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rSNSlOM ENVEtVPfc COSP.

is the story of six human beings who
lived through the greatest single man-
made disaster in history. With what
Bruce Bliven called “the simplicity of
genius/’ John Hersey tells what these
six-a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a
physician, a Methodist minister, a
young surgeon, and a German Catholic
priest — were doing at 8:15 a.m. on
August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was
destroyed by the first atom bomb ever
dropped on a city. Then he follows the
course of their lives hour by hour, day
by day, building up with sure, quiet
artistry the already classic piece that
Lewis Gannett called “the best report-
ing to come out of this war.”

ALSO BY John Hersey

Men on Bataan

(1942)

Into the Valley

(1943)

A Bell for Adano

.(1944A

THESE ARE BORZOI BOOKS

published in New York by A If red • A • Knopf

Hiroshima

JOHN HERSEY

Hiroshima

New York : Alfred - A- Knopf

1946

y BY JOHN HERSEY

All rigbtt ^sewed, Xo part of this book may be repro-
duceAjjiik^iy forrn without permission in writing from the
piihlisher^ except by a reviewer who may quote brief pas-
sages in a review to be printed in a magazme or newspaper.

FIRST EDITION

Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada by The Ryerson Press

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBUSHED BY ALFRED * A • KNOPF INC*

Hiroshima originally appeared ixiThe New Yorker.
The author wishes to thank the editors of that
magazine, especially Mr. Harold Ross and Mr.
William Shawn, for their considerable share in its
preparation.

Hiroshima

I ■ A Noiseless Flash

At EXAcn-Y fifteen minutes past eight in the mom-
jl\. ing, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the mo-
ment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima,
Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the pei-sonnel depart-
ment of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down
at her place in the plant office and was turning her
head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At tliat same
moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-
legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his pri-
vate hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic
rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Naka-
mura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her
kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house
because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire
lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of
the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a
cot on the top floor of his order s three-story mission

3

HIROSHIMA

house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit;
Dn Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical
staff of the city's large, modern Red Cross Hospital,
^v'alkcd along one of the hospital con*idors with a blood
specimen for a W'^assermann test in his hand; and the
Reverend Mr* Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiro-
shima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich
man’s house in Koi, the city’s w^estern suburb, and pre-
pared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacu-
ated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which
everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred
thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and
these six were among the survivors. They still won-
der why they lived when so many others died. Each
of them counts many small items of chance or volition
—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catch-
ing one streetcar instead of tlie next— tliat spared him.
And now each knows that in tlie act of survival he
lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever
thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew
anything,

TiTE Reverend Mr. Tanimoto got up at five o’clock
tliat morning. He was alone in the parsonage, because
for some time his wife had been commuting with
their year-old baby to spend nights with a friend in
Ushida, a suburb to the north. Of all the important
cities of Japan, only two, Kyoto and Hiroshima, had
not been visited in strength by B-san^ or Mr. B, as the
Japanese, with a mixture of respect and unhappy fa-

4

A Noiseless Flash

miliarity, called the B-ag; and Mr. Tanimoto, like all
his neighbors and friends, was almost sick with anx-
iety. He had heard uncomfortably detailed accounts
of mass raids on Kure, Iwakuni, Tokuyama, and other
nearby towns; he was sure Hiroshima's turn would
come soon. He had slept badly the night before, be-
cause there had been several air-raid warnings. Hiro-
shima had been getting such warnings almost every
night for weeks, for at that time the B-ags were using
Lake Biwa, northeast of Hiroshima, as a rendezvous
point, and no matter what city the Americans planned
to hit, the Superfortresses streamed in over the coast
near Hiroshima. The frequency of the warnings and
the continued abstinence of Mr. B with respect to
Hiroshima had made its citizens jittery; a rumor was
going around that the Americans were saving some-
thing special for the city.

Mr. Tanimoto is a small man, quick to talk, laugh,
and cry. He wears his black hair parted in the middle
and rather long; the prominence of the frontal bones
just above his eyebrows and the smallness of his mus-
tache, mouth, and chin give him a strange, old-young
look, boyish and yet wise, weak and yet fiery. He moves
nervously and fast, but with a restraint which suggests
that he is a cautious, thoughtful man. He showed, in-
deed, just those qualities in the uneasy days before
the bomb fell. Besides having his wife spend the nights
in Ushida, Mr. Tanimoto had been carrying all the
portable things from his church, in the close-packed
residential district called Nagaragawa, to a house that

5

HIROSHIMA

belonged to a rayon manufacturer in Koi, nm miles
from the center of town. The rayon man, a Mr. Matsui,
had opened his then unoccupied estate to a large num-
ber of his friends and acquaintances, so that they might
evacuate whatever they wished to a safe distance from
the probable target area. Mr. Tanimoto had had no
difficulty in moving chairs, hymnals, Bibles, altar gear,
and church records by pushcart himself, but the organ
console and an upright piano required some aid. A
friend of his named Matsuo had, the day before, helped
him get the piano out to Koi; in return, he had prom-
ised this day to assist Mr. Matsuo in hauling out a
daughter's belongings. That is why he had risen so
early.

Mr. Tanimoto cooked his own breakfast He felt
awfully tired. The effort of moving the piano the day
before, a sleepless night, weeks of worry and unbal-
anced diet, the cares of his parish— all combined to
make him feel hardly adequate to the new day’s work.
There was another thing, too: Mr. Tanimoto had
studied theology at Emory College, in Atlanta, Geor-
gia; he had graduated in 1940; he spoke excellent Eng-
lish; he dressed in American clothes; he had corre-
sponded with many American friends right up to the
time the war began; and among a people obsessed with
a fear of being spied upon— perhaps almost obsessed
himself— he found himself growing increasingly un-
easy. The police had questioned him several times, and
just a few days before, he had heard that an influential
acquaintance, a Mr. Tanaka, a retired officer of the

6

A Noiseless Flash

Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line, an anti-Christian,
a man famous in Hiroshima for his shoiv^" philan-
thropies and notorious for his personal tyrannies, had
been telling people that Tanimoto should not be
trusted. In compensation, to show himself publicly a
good Japanese, Mr, Tanimoto had taken on the chair-
manship of his local tonarigumi, or Neighborhood As-
sociation, and to his other duties and concerns this
position had added the business of organizing air-raid
defense for about twenty families.

Before six o’clock that morning, Mr. Tanimoto
started for Mr. Matsuo’s house. There he found that
their burden was to be a tansti, a large Japanese cabinet,
full of clothing and household goods. The two men set
out. The morning was perfectly clear and so warm
that the day promised to be uncomfortable. A few
minutes after they started, the air-raid siren went off—
a minute-long blast that xvamed of approaching planes
but indicated to the people of Hiroshima only a slight
degree of danger, since it sounded every morning at
this time, when an American weather plane came over.
The two men pulled and pushed the handcart through
the city streets. Hiroshima was a fan-shaped city, lying
mostly on the six islands formed by the seven estuarial
rivers that branch out from the Ota River; its main
commercial and residential districts, covering about
four square miles in the center of the city, contained
three-quarters of its population, which had been re-
due^ by several evacuation programs from a wartime
peal of 380,000 to about 245,000. Factories and other

7

HIROSHIMA

residential districts, or suburbs, lay compactly around
the edges of the city. To the south were the docks, an
airport, and the island-studded Inland Sea. A rim of
mountains runs around the other three sides of the
delta. Mr. Tanimoto and Mr. Matsuo took their way
through the shopping center, already full of people,
and across two of the rivers to the sloping streets of
Koi, and up them to the outskirts and foothills. As they
started up a valley away from the tight-ranked houses,
the all-clear sounded. (The Japanese radar operators,
detecting only three planes, supposed that they com-
prised a reconnaissance.) Pushing the handcart up to
the rayon man’s house was tiring, and the men, after
they had maneuvered their load into the driveway and
to the front steps, paused to rest awhile. They stood
with a wing of the house between them and the city.
Like most homes in this part of Japan, the house con-
sisted of a wooden frame and wooden walls support-
ing a heavy tile roof. Its front hall, packed with rolls
of bedding and clothing, looked like a cool cave full
of fet cushions. Opposite the house, to the right of the
front door, there was a large, finicky rock garden.
There was no sound of planes. The morning was still;
the place was cool and pleasant.

Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky.
Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it
travelled from east to west, from the city toward thp
hills. It seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr. Matsuo
reacted in terror— and both had time to react (for
they were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the <;^ter

8

A Noiseless Flash

of the explosion). Mr. ifatsiio dashed up the front
steps into tlie house and dived among the bedrolls and
buried himself there. Mr. Tanimoto took four or five
steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the
garden. He bellied up very hard against one of them.
As his face %vas against the stone, he did not see wliat
happened. He felt a sudden pressure, and then splin-
ters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on
him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima
recalls hearing any noise of the bomb. But a fisher-
man in his sampan on the Inland Sea near Tsuzu, the
man with whom Mr. Tanimoto’s mother-in-law and
sister-in-law were living, saw the flash and heard a tre-
mendous explosion: he was nearly twenty miles from
Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater than when
the B-29S hit Iwakuni, only five miles away.)

When he dared, Mr. Tanimoto raised his head and
saw that the rayon man’s house had collapsed. He
thought a bomb had fallen directly on it. Such clouds
of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight
around. In panic, not thinking for the moment of Mr.
Matsuo under the ruins, he dashed out into the street.
He noticed as he ran that the concrete wall of the estate
had fallen over—toward the house rather than away
from it. In the street, thetfirst thing he saw was a squad
of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside
opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in
wfeidbl the Japanese apparently intended to resist in-
hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were com-
ing-b^t of the hole, where they should have been safe.

9

H I R O S H I A

and blood was running from their heads, chests, and
backs. They were silent and dazed.

Under %vhat seemed to be a local dust cloud, the
day grew” darker and darker.

At nearly midnight, the night before the bomb was
dropped, an announcer on the city’s radio station said
that about uvo hundred B-29S were approaching south-
ern Honshu and advised the population of Hiroshima
to evacuate to tlieir designated '‘safe areas.” Mrs. Hat-
suyo Nakamura, the tailor’s widow, who lived in the
section called Nobori-cho and who had long had a habit
of doing as she W’as told, got her three children— a ten-
year-old boy, Toshio, an eight-year-old girl, Yaeko, and
a five-year-old girl, Myeko— out of bed and dressed
them and walked with them to the military area known
as the East Parade Ground, on the northeast edge of the
city. There she unrolled some mats and the children lay
down on them. They slept until about two, when they
were awakened by the roar of the planes going over
Hiroshima.

As soon as the planes had passed, Mrs. Nakamura
started back with her children. They reached home a
little after two-thirty and she immediately turned on
the radio, which, to her distress, was just then broad-
casting a fresh warning. When she looked at the chil-
dren and saw how tired they were, and when she
thought of the number of trips they had made in past
weeks, all to no purpose, to the East Parade Ground,
she decided that in spite of the instructions on ^he

z o

A Noiseless Flash

radio, she simply could not face starting out all over
again. She put the children in their bedrolls on the
floor, lay down herself at three o’clock, and fell asleep at
once, so soundly that when planes passed over later, she
did not waken to tlieir sound.

The siren jarred her awake at about seven. She arose,
dressed quickly* and hurried to the house of Mr. Naka-
moto, the head of her Neighborhood Association, and
asked him what she should do. He said that she should
remain at home unless an urgent warning— a series of
intermittent blasts of the siren— was sounded. She re-
turned home, lit the stove in the kitchen, set some rice
to cook, and sat down to read that morning’s Hiroshima
Chugoku, To her relief, the all-clear sounded at eight
o’clock. She heard the children stirring, so she went
and gave each of them a handful of peanuts and told
them to stay on their bedrolls, because they were tired
from the night’s walk. She had hoped that they would
go back to sleep, but the man in the house directly to
the south began to make a terrible hullabaloo of ham-
mering, wedging, ripping, and splitting. The prefec-
tural government, convinced, as everyone in Hiro-
shima was, that the city would be attacked soon, had
begun to press with threats and warnings for the com-
pletion of wide fire lanes, which, it was hoped, might
act in conjunction with the rivers to localize any fires
started by an incendiary raid; and the neighbor was
reluctantly sacrificing his home to the city’s safety. Just
the day before, the prefecture had ordered all able-
bodied girls from the secondary schools to spend a few

HIROSHIMA

<Liys helping to clesr these lanes, and they started work
soon after the all-clear sounded.

Mrs. Nakamura went back to the kitchen, looked at
the rice, and began watching the man next door. At
first, she was annoyed with him for making so much
noise, but tlien she was moved almost to tears by pity.
Her emotion was specifically directed toward her neigh-
bor, tearing down his home, board by board, at a time
when there was so much unavoidable destruction, but
undoubtedly she also felt a generalized, community
pity, to say nothing of self-pity. She had not had an easy
time. Her husband, Isawa, had gone into the Army just
after Myeko was bom, and she had heard nothing from
or of him for a long time, until, on March 5, 1942, she
received a seven-word telegram: ‘ Isawa died an hon-
orable death at Singapore.” She learned later that he
had died on February 15th, the day Singapore fell, and
that he had been a corporal. Isawa had been a not par-
ticularly prosperous tailor, and his only capital was a
Sankoku sewing machine. After his death, when his
allotments stopped coming, Mrs. Nakamura got out
the machine and began to take in piecework herself,
and since then had supported the children, but poorly,
by sewing.

As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor,
everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever
seen. She did not notice what happened to the man
next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion
toward her children. She had taken a single step (the
house was 1 ,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from

1 2

A Noiseless Flash

the center of the explosion) when something picked her
up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the
raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.

Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower
of tiles pommelled her; everything became dark, for
she was buried. The debris did not cover her deeply.
She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child cry,
“Mother, help mel,” and saw her youngest— Myeko,
the five-year-old— buried up to her breast and unable
to move. As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw
her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing
of her other children.

In the days right before the bombing. Dr. Masakazu
Fujii, being prosperous, hedonistic, and at the time
not too busy, had been allowing himself the luxury of
sleeping until nine or nine-thirty, but fortunately he
had to get up early the morning the bomb was dropped
to see a house guest off on a train. He rose at six, and
half an hour later walked with his friend to the station,
not far away, across two of the rivers. He was back home
by seven, just as the siren sounded its sustained warn-
ing. He ate- breakfast and then, because the morning
was already hot, undressed down to his underwear and
went out on the porch to read the paper. This porch
—in fact, the whole building— was curiously con-
structed. Dr. Fujii was the proprietor of a peculiarly
Japanese institution: a private, single-doctor hospital.
This building, perched beside and over the water of
the Kyo River, and next to the bridge of the same

HIROSHIMA

name, contained thirty rooms for thirty patients and
their kinfolk— for, according to Japanese custom, when
a person falls sick and goes to a hospital, one or more
members of his family go and live there with him, to
cook for him, bathe, massage, and read to him, and to
offer incessant familial sympathy, without which a
Japanese patient would be miserable indeed. Dr. Fujii
had no beds— only straw mats— for his patients. He did,
however, have all sorts of modem equipment: an X-
ray machine, diathermy apparatus, and a fine tiled
laboratory. The structure rested two-thirds on the
land, one-third on piles over the tidal waters of the
Kyo. This overhang, the part of the building where
Dr. Fujii lived, was queer-looking, but it was cool in
summer and from the porch, which faced away from
the center of the city, the prospect of the river, with
pleasure boats drifting up and down it, was always
refreshing. Dr. Fujii had occasionally had anxious mo-
ments when the Ota and its mouth branches rose to
flood, but the piling was apparently firm enough and
the house had always held.

Dr. Fujii had been relatively idle for about a month
because in July, as the number of untouched cities in
Japan dwindled and as Hiroshima seemed more and
more inevitably a target, he began turning patients
away, on the ground that in case of a fire raid he would
not be able to evacuate them. Now he had only two
patients left— a woman from Yano, injured in the
shoulder, and a young man of twenty-five recovering
from bums he had suffered when the steel factory near

1 4

A Noiseless Flash

Hiroshima in which he '^srorked had been hit. Dr.
Fujii had six nurses to tend his patients. His wife and
children were safe; his wife and one son were living
outside Osaka, and another son and two daughters
were in the country on Kyushu. A niece was living with
him, and a maid and a manservant. He had little to do
and did not mind, for he had saved some money. At
fifty, he was healthy, convivial, and calm, and he was
pleased to pass the evenings drinking whiskey with
friends, always sensibly and for the sake of conversa-
tion. Before the war, he had affected brands imported
from Scotland and America; now he was perfectly
satisfied with the best Japanese brand, Suntory.

Dr. Fujii sat down cross-legged in his underwear on
the spotless matting of the porch, put on his glasses,
and started reading the Osaka Asahi, He liked to read
the Osaka news because his wife was there. He saw the
flash. To him— faced away from the center and looking
at his paper— it seemed a brilliant yellow. Startled, he
began to rise to his feet. In that moment (he was 1,550
yards from the center), the hospital leaned behind his
rising and, with a terrible ripping noise, toppled into
the river. The Doctor, still in the act of getting to his
feet, was thrown forward and around and over; he
was buffeted and gripped; he lost track of everything,
because things were so speeded up; he felt the water.

Dr. Fujii hardly had time to think that he was dying
before he realized that he was alive, squeezed tightly
by two long timbers in a V across his chest, like a morsel
suspended between two huge chopsticks— held upright.

HIROSHIMA

so that he could not move, with his head miraculously
above water and his torso and legs in it. The remains
of his hospital were all around him in a mad assort-
ment of splintered lumber and materials for the relief
of pain. His left shoulder hurt terribly. His glasses
were gone.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, of the Society of Jesus,
was, on the morning of the explosion, in rather frail
condition. The Japanese wartime diet had not sus-
tained him, and he felt the strain of being a foreigner in
an increasingly xenophobic Japan; even a German,
since the defeat of the Fatherland, was unpopular.
Father Kleinsorge had, at thirty-eight, the look of a boy
growing too fast— thin in the face, with a prominent
Adam’s apple, a hollow chest, dangling hands, big feet.
He walked clumsily, leaning forward a little. He was
tired all the time. To make matters worse, he’ had suf-
fered for two days, along with Father Cieslik, a fellow-
priest, from a rather painful and urgent diarrhea, which
they blamed on the beans and black ration bread they
were obliged to eat. Two other priests then living in
the mission compound, which was in the Nobori-cho
section— Father Superior LaSalle and Father Schiffer-
had happily escaped this affliction.

Father Kleinsorge woke up about six the morning
the bomb was dropped, and half an hour later — he was
a bit tardy because of his sickness— he began to read
Mass in the mission chapel, a small Japanese-style
wooden building which was without pews, since its

A Noiseless Flash

worshippers knelt on the usual Japanese matted floor,
facing an altar graced with splendid silks, brass, silver,
and heavy embroideries. This morning, a Monday, the
only worshippers were Mr. Takemoto, a theological
student living in the mission house; Mr. Fukai, the
secretary of the diocese; Mrs. Murata, the mission’s
devoutly Christian housekeeper; and his fellow-priests.
After Mass, while Father Kleinsorge was reading the
Prayers of Thanksgiving, the siren sounded. He
stopped the service and the missionaries retired across
the compound to the bigger building. There, in his
room on the ground floor, to the right of the front
door. Father Kleinsorge changed into a military uni-
form which he had acquired when he was teaching at
the Rokko Middle School in Kobe and which he wore
during air-raid alerts.

After an alarm, Father Kleinsorge always went out
and scanned the sky, and in this instance, when he
stepped outside, he was glad to see only the single
weather plane that flew over Hiroshima each day about
this time. Satisfied that nothing would happen, he went
in and breakfasted with the other Fathers on substi-
tute coffee and ration bread, which, under the circum-
stances, was especially repugnant to him. The Fathers
sat and talked awhile, until, at eight, they heard the
all-clear. They went then to various parts of the build-
ing. Father Schiffer retired to his room to do some writ-
ing. Father Cieslik sat in his room in a straight chair
with a pillow over his stomach to ease his pain, and
read. Father Superior LaSalle stood at the window of

HIROSHIMA

his room, thinking. Father Kleinsorge went up to a
room on the third floor, took ofE all his clothes except
his underwear, and stretched out on his right side on
a cot and began reading his Stimmen der Zeit.

After the terrible flash — which, Father Kleinsorge
later realized, reminded him of something he had read
as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth
—he had time (since he was 1,400 yards from the comer)
for one thought; A bomb has fallen directly on us.
Then, for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his
mind.

Father Kleinsorge never knew how he got out of the
house. The next things he was conscious of were that
he was wandering around in the mission’s vegetable
garden in his underwear, bleeding slightly from small
cuts along his left flank; that all the buildings round
about had fallen down except the Jesuits’ mission
house, which had long before been braced and double-
braced by a priest named Cropper, who was terrified
of earthquakes; that the day had turned dark; and that
Murata-^an, the housekeeper, was nearby, crying over
and over, “Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai! Qur Lord Jesus,
have pity on usi”

On THE TRAIN OH the way into Hiroshima from the
country, where he lived with his mother. Dr. Teru-
fumi Sasaki, the Red Cross Hospital surgeon, thought
over an unpleasant nightmare he had had the night
before. His mother’s home was in Mukaihara, thirty
miles from the city, and it took him two hours by train

1 8

A Noiseless Flash

and tram to reach the hospital. He had slept uneasily
all night and had wakened an hour earlier than usual,
and, feeling sluggish and slightly feverish, had debated
whether to go to the hospital at all; his sense of duty
finally forced him to go, and he had started out on an
earlier train than he took most mornings. The dream
had particularly frightened him because it was so
closely associated, on the surface at least, with a dis-
turbing actuality. He was only twenty-five years old
and had just completed his training at the Eastern
Medical University, in Tsingtao, China. He was some-
thing of an idealist and was much distressed by the in-
adequacy of medical facilities in the country town
where his mother lived. Quite on his own, and without
a permit, he had begun visiting a few sick people out
there in the evenings, after his eight hours at the hos-
pital and four hours’ commuting. He had recently
learned that the penalty for practicing without a per-
mit was severe; a fellow-doctor whom he had asked
about it had given him a serious scolding. Neverthe-
less, he had continued to practice. In his dream, he had
been at the bedside of a country patient when the po-
lice and the doctor he had consulted burst into the
room, seized him, dragged him outside, and beat him
up cruelly. On the train, he just about decided to give
up the work in Mukaihara, since he felt it would be
impossible to get a permit, because the authorities
would hold that it would conflict with his duties at the
Red Cross Hospital.

At the terminus, he caught a streetcar at once. (He

HIROSHIMA

later calculated that i£ he had taken his customary train
that morning, and if he had had to wait a few minutes
for the streetcar, as often happened, he would have
been close to the center at the time of the explosion
and would surely have perished.) He arrived at the
hospital at seven-forty and reported to the chief sur-
geon. A few minutes later, he went to a room on the
first floor and drew blood from the arm of a man in
order to perform a Wassermann test. The laboratory
containing the incubators for the test was on the third
floor. With the blood specimen in his left hand, walk-
ing in a kind of distraction he had felt all morning,
probably because of the dream and his restless night,
he started along the main corridor on his way toward
the stairs. He was one step beyond an open window
when the light of the bomb was reflected, like a gigantic
photographic flash, in the corridor. He ducked down
on one knee and said to himself, as only a Japanese
would, “Sasaki, gambareJ Be brave!” Just then (the
building was 1,650 yards from the center) , the blast
ripped through the hospital. The glasses he was wear-
ing flew off his face; the bottle of blood crashed against
one wall; his Japanese slippers zipped out from under
his feet— but otherwise, thanks to where he stood, he
was untouched.

Dr. Sasaki shouted the name of the chief surgeon
and rushed around to the man’s office and found him
terribly cut by glass. The hospital was in horrible con-
fusion: heavy partitions and ceilings had fallen on pa-

2 O

A Noiseless Flash

tients, beds had overturned, windows had blown in
and cut people, blood was spattered on the walls and
floors, instruments were everytvhere, many of the pa-
tients were running about screaming, many more lay
dead. (A colleague working in die laboratory to which
Dr. Sasaki had been walking was dead; Dr. Sasaki’s pa-
tient, whom he had just left and who a few moments
before had been dreadfully afraid of syphilis, was also
dead.) Dr. Sasaki found himself the only doctor in the
hospital who was unhurt.

Dr. Sasaki, who believed that the enemy had hit only
the building he was in, got bandages and began to bind
the wounds of those inside the hospital; while outside,
all over Hiroshima, maimed and dying citizens turned
their unsteady steps toward the Red Cross Hospital to
begin an invasion that was to make Dr. Sasaki forget
his private nightmare for a long, long time.

Miss Toshiko Sasaki, the East Asia Tin Works clerk,
who is not related to Dr. Sasaki, got up at three o’clock
in the morning on the day the bomb fell. There was
extra housework to do. Her eleven-month-old brother,
Akio, had come down the day before with a serious
stomach upset; her mother had taken him to the Ta-
mura Pediatric Hospital and was staying there with
him. Miss Sasaki, who was about twenty, had to cook
breakfast for her father, a brother, a sister, and herself,
and—since the hospital, because of the war, was unable
to provide food— to prepare a whole day’s meals for her

HIROSHIMA

mother and the baby, in time for her father, who
worked in a factory making rubber earplugs for ar-
tillery crews, to take the food by on his way to the
plant. When she had finished and had cleaned and put
away the cooking things, it was nearly seven. The fam-
ily lived in Koi, and she had a forty-five-minute trip to
the tin works, in the section of town called Kannon-
machi. She was in charge of the personnel records in
the factory. She left Koi at seven, and as soon as she
reached the plant, she went with some of the other girls
from the personnel department to the factory audito-
rium. A prominent local Navy man, a former employee,
had committed suicide the day before by throwing
himself under a train— a death considered honorable
enough to warrant a memorial service, which was to be
held at the tin works at ten o’clock that morning. In
the large hall. Miss Sasaki and the others made suitable
preparations for the meeting. This work took about
twenty minutes.

Miss Sasaki went back to her office and sat down at
her desk. She was quite far from the windows, which
were off to her left, and behind her were a couple of
tall bookcases containing all the books of the factory
library, which the personnel department had organ-
ized. She settled herself at her desk, put some things
in a drawer, and shifted papers. She thought that be-
fore she began to make entries in her lists of new em-
ployees, discharges, and departures for the Army, she
would chat for a moment with the girl at her right.
Just as she turned her head away from the windows,

S 2

A Noiseless Flash

the room was filled with a blinding light. She was para-
lyzed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment
(the plant was 1,600 yards from the center) .

Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness.
The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor
above collapsed in splinters and the people up there
came down and the roof above them gave way; but
principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind
her swooped forward and the contents threw her down,
with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking under-
neath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment
of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

II • The Fire

I MMEDIATELY after the explosion, the Reverend Mr.

Kiyoshi Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the
Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the
bloody soldiers at the mouth of the dugout they had
been digging, attached himself sympathetically to an
old lady who was walking along in a daze, holding her
head with her left hand, supporting a small boy of
three or four on her back with her right, and crying,
'‘I’m hurt! I'm hurt! Tm hurt!” Mr. Tanimoto trans-
ferred the child to his own back and led the woman
by the hand down the street, which was darkened by
what seemed to be a local column of dust. He took the
woman to a grammar school not far away that had pre-
viously been designated for use as a temporary hospital
in case of emergency. By this solicitous behavior, Mr.
Tanimoto at once got rid of his terror. At the school.

The Fire

he was much surprised to see glass all over the floor and
fifty or sixty injured people already waiting to be
treated. He reflected that, although the all-clear had
sounded and he had heard no planes, several bombs
must have been dropped. He thought of a hillock in
the rayon man’s garden from which he could get a view
of the whole of Koi— of the whole of Hiroshima, for
that matter— and he rah back up to the estate.

From the mound, Mr. Tanimoto saw an astonishing
panorama. Not just a patch of Koi, as he had expected,
but as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the
clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma.
Clumps of smoke, near and far, had begun to push up
through the general dust. He wondered how such ex-
tensive damage could have been dealt out of a silent
sky; even a few planes, far up, would have been audi-
ble. Houses nearby were burning, and when huge
drops of water the size of marbles began to fall, he half
thought that they must be coming from the hoses of
firemen fighting the blazes. (They were actually drops
of condensed moisture falling from the turbulent
tower of dust, heat, and fission fragments that had al-
ready risen miles into the sky above Hiroshima.)

Mr. Tanimoto turned away from the sight when he
heard Mr. Matsuo call out to ask whether he was all
right. Mr. Matsuo had been safely cushioned within
the falling house by the bedding stored in the front
hall and had worked his way out. Mr. Tanimoto scarce-
ly answered. He had thought of his wife and baby, his

2 5

HIROSHIMA

church, his home, his parishioners, all of them down
in that awful murk. Once more he began to run in
fear— toward the city.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the tailor’s widow, hav-
ing struggled up from under the ruins of her house
after the explosion, and seeing Myeko, the youngest
of her three children, buried breast-deep and unable
to move, crawled across the debris, hauled at timbers,
and flung tiles aside, in a hurried effort to free the
child. Then, from what seemed to be caverns far be-
low, she heard two small voices crying, “Tasukete!
Tasukete! Help! Help!”

She called the names of her ten-year-old son and
eight-year-old daughter: “Toshio! Yaeko!”

The voices from below answered.

Mrs. Nakamura abandoned Myeko, who at least
could breathe, and in a frenzy made the wreckage fly
above the crying voices. The children had been sleep-
ing nearly ten feet apart, but now their voices seemed
to come from the same place. Toshio, the boy, appar-
ently had some freedom to move, because she could
feel him undermining the pile of wood and tiles as she
worked from above. At last she saw his head, and she
hastily pulled him out by it. A mosquito net was wound
intricately, as if it had been carefully wrapped, around
his feet. He said he had been blown right across the
room and had been on top of his sister Yaeko under
the wreckage. She now said, from underneath, that she
could not move, because there was something on her

2 6

The Fire

legs. With a bit more digging, Mrs Nakamura cleared
a hoU: above the child and began to pull her arm.

It hurtsf’ Yaeko cried. Mrs. Nakamura shouted,
“There’s no time now to say whether it hurts or not,”
and yanked her whimpering daughter up. Then she
freed Myeko. The children were filthy and bruised,
but none of them had a single cut or scratch.

Mrs. Nakamura took the children out into the street.
They had nothing on but underpants, and although
the day was very hot, she worried rather confusedly
about their being cold, so she went back into the
wreckage and burrowed underneath and found a bun-
dle of clothes she had packed for an emergency, and
she dressed them in pants, blouses, shoes, padded-
cotton air-raid helmets called hokuxuki, and even, ir-
rationally, overcoats. The children were silent, except
for tlie five-year-old, Myeko, who kept asking ques-
tions: “Why is it night already? Why did our house
fall down? What happened?” Mrs. Nakamura, who did
not know what had happened (had not the all-clear
sounded?), looked around and saw through the dark-
ness that all the houses in her neighborhood had col-
lapsed. The house next door, which its owner had been
tearing down to make way for a fire lane, was now very
thoroughly, if crudely, torn down; its owner, who
had been sacrificing his home for the community’s
safety, lay dead. Mrs. Nakamoto, wife of the head of
the local air-raid-defense Neighborhood Association,
came across the street with her head all bloody, and
said that her baby was badly cut; did Mrs. Nakamura

^ 7

HIROSHIMA

have any bandage? Mrs. Nakamura did not, but she
crawled into the remains of her house again and palled
out some white cloth that she had been using in her
work as a seamstress, ripped it into strips, and gave it
to Mrs. Nakamoto. While fetching the cloth, she no-
ticed her sewing machine; she went back in for it and
dragged it out. Obviously, she could not carry it with
her, so she unthinkingly plunged her symbol of liveli-
hood into the receptacle which for weeks had been her
symbol of safety— the cement tank of water in front of
her house, of the type every household had been or-
dered to construct against a possible fire raid.

A nervous neighbor, Mrs. Hataya, called to Mrs.
Nakamura to run away with her to the woods in Asano
Park— an estate, by the Kyo River not far off, belonging
to the wealthy Asano family, who once owned the
Toyo Risen Kaisha steamship line. The park had been
designated as an evacuation area for their neighbor-
hood. Seeing fire breaking out in a nearby ruin (except
at the very center, where the bomb itself ignited
some fires, most of Hiroshima’s citywide conflagration
was caused by inflammable wreckage falling on cook-
stoves and live wires), Mrs. Nakamura suggested going
over to fight it. Mrs. Hataya said, ‘‘Don’t be foolish.
What if planes come and drop more bombs?” So Mrs.
Nakamura started out for Asano Park with her chil-
dren and Mrs, Hataya, and she carried her rucksack
of emergency clothing, a blanket, an umbrella, and a
suitcase of things she had cached in her air-raid shelter.
Under many ruins, as they hurried along, they heard

S 8

The Fire

mujHled screams for help. The only building they saw
standing on their way to Asano Park was the Jesuit
mission house, alongside the Catholic kindergarten to
which Mrs. Nakamura had sent Myeko for a time. As
they passed it, she saw Father Kleinsorge, in bloody
underwear, running out of the house with a small suit-
case in his hand.

Right after the explosion, while Father Wilhelm
Kleinsorge, S. J., was wandering around in his under-
wear in the vegetable garden. Father Superior LaSalle
came around the corner of the building in the darkness.
His body, especially his back, was bloody; the flash had
made him twist away from his window, and tiny pieces
of glass had flown at him. Father Kleinsorge, still be-
wildered, managed to ask, 'Where are the rest?'* Just
then, the two other priests living in the mission house
appeared— Father Cieslik, unhurt, supporting Father
Schiffer, who was covered with blood that spurted from
a cut above his left ear and who was very pale. Father
Cieslik was rather pleased with himself, for after the
flash he had dived into a doorway, which he had pre-
viously reckoned to be the safest place inside the build-
ing, and when the blast came, he was not injured.
Father LaSalle told Father Cieslik to take Father
Schiffer to a doctor before he bled to death, and sug-
gested either Dr. Kanda, who lived on the next corner,
or Dr. Fujii, about six blocks away. The two men went
out of the compound and up the street.

The daughter of Mr. Hoshijima, the mission cate-

2 9

HIROSHIMA

chist. Tan up to Father Kleinsorge and said that her
mother and sister were buried under the ruins of their
house, which was at the back of the Jesuit compound,
and at the same time the priests noticed that the house
of the Catholic-kindergarten teacher at the front of the
compound had collapsed on her. While Father LaSalle
and Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper, dug the
teacher out. Father Kleinsorge went to the catechist’s
fallen house and began lifting things off the top of the
pile. There was not a sound underneath; he was sure
the Hoshijima women had been killed. At last, under
what had been a comer of the kitchen, he saw Mrs,
Hoshijima’s head. Believing her dead, he began to haul
her out by the hair, but suddenly she screamed,

Itai! It hurts! It hurts!’" He dug some more and lifted
her out. He managed, too, to find her daughter in the
rubble and free her. Neither was badly hurt.

A public bath next door to the mission house had
caught fire, but since there the wind was southerly, the
priests thought their house would be spared. Neverthe-
less, as a precaution. Father Kleinsorge went inside to
fetch some things he wanted to save. He found his room
in a state of weird and illogical confusion. A first-aid
kit was hanging undisturbed on a hook on the wall,
but his clothes, which had been on other hooks nearby,
were'^^nowhere to be seen. His desk was in splinters all
ovefthe room, but a mere papier-mach6 suitcase, which
he had hidden under the desk, stood handle-side up,
without a scratch on it, in the doorway of the room,
where he could not miss it. Father Kleialsorge later

S o

The Fire

came to regard this as a bit of Providential interference,
inasmuch as the suitcase contained his breviary, the
account books for the whole diocese, and a considerable
amount of paper money belonging to the mission, for
which he was responsible. He ran out of the house and
deposited the suitcase in the mission air-raid shelter.

At about this time, Father Cieslik and Father Schif-
fer, who was still spurting blood, came back and said
that Dr. Kanda's house was ruined and that fire blocked
them from getting out of what they supposed to be the
local circle of destruction to Dr. Fujii’s private hospital,
on the bank of the Kyo River.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii’s hospital was no longer on the
bank of the Kyo River,* it was in the river. After the
overturn, Dr. Fujii was so stupefied and so tightly
squeezed by the beams gripping his chest that he was
unable to move at first, and he hung there about twenty
minutes in the darkened morning. Then a thought
which came to him— that soon the tide would be run-
ning in through the estuaries and his head would be
submerged— inspired him to fearful activity; he wrig-
gled and turned and exerted what strength he could
(though his left arm, because of the pain in his shoul-
der, was useless), and before long he had freed himself
from the vise. After a few moments’ rest, he climbed
onto the pile of timbers and, finding a long one that
slanted up to the river-bank, he painfully shinnied
up it.

Dr. Fujii, who was in his underwear, was now soak-

3 1

HIROSHIMA

ing and dirty. His undershirt was tom, and blood ran
down it from bad cuts on his chin and back. In this
dis-rray, he walked out onto Kyo Bridge, beside which
his hospital had stood. The bridge had not collapsed.
He could see only fuzzily without his glasses, but he
could see enough to be amazed at the number of houses
that were down ail around. On the bridge, he encoun-
tered a friend, a doctor named Machii, and asked in
bewilderment, ^'What do you think it was?

Dr. Machii said, '"It must have been a Molotoffano
hanakago"—2L Molotov flower basket, the delicate Jap-
anese name for the “bread basket,” or self-scattering
cluster of bombs.

At first. Dr. Fuji! could see only two fires, one across
the river from his hospital site and one quite far to the
south. But at the same time, he and his friend observed
something that puzzled them, and which, as doctors,
they discussed: although there were as yet very few
fires, wounded people were hurrying across the bridge
in an endless parade of misery, and many of them ex-
hibited terrible burns on their faces and arms. “Why
do you suppose it is?” Dr. Fujii asked. Even a theory
was comforting that day, and Dr. Machii stuck to his,
“Perhaps because it was a Molotov flower basket,'* he
said.

There had been no breeze earlier in the morning
when Dr. Fujii had walked to the railway station to see
his friend off, but now brisk winds were blowing every
which way; here on the bridge the wind was easterly.
New fires were leaping up, and they spread quickly,

The Fire

and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot air and
showers of cinders made it impossible to stand on the
bridge any more. Dr. Machii ran to the far side of the
river and along a still unkindled street. Dr. Fujii went
down into the water under the bridge, where a score of
people had already taken refuge, among them his serv-
ants, who had extricated themselves from the wreckage.
From there. Dr. Fujii saw a nurse hanging in the tim-
bers of his hospital by her legs, and then another pain-
fully pinned across the breast. He enlisted the help of
some of the others under the bridge and freed lx>th
of them. He thought he heard the voice of his niece for
a moment, but he could not find her; he never saw her
again. Four of his nurses and the two patients in the
hospital died, too. Dr, Fujii went back into the water
of the river and waited for the fire to subside.

LOT of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after
the explosion— and, as these three were typical, that of
the majority of the physicians and surgeons of Hiro-
shima— with their offices and hospitals destroyed, their
equipment scattered, their own bodies incapacitated
in varying degrees, explained why so many citizens who
were hurt went untended and why so many who might
have lived died. Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the
city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest
were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too
badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the
Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to
function, and only ten nurses out of more than two

3 3

HIROSHIMA

hundred. The sole uninjured doctor on the Red Cross
Hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki. After the explosion, he
hurried to a storeroom to fetch bandages. This room,
like everything he had seen as he ran through the hos-
pital, was chaotic— bottles of medicines thrown off
shelves and broken, salves spattered on the walls, in-
struments strewn everywhere. He grabbed up some
bandages and an unbroken bottle of mercurochrome,
hurried back to the chief surgeon, and bandaged his
cuts. Then he went out into the corridor and began
patching up the wounded patients and the doctors and
nurses there. He blundered so without his glasses that
he took a pair off the face of a wounded nurse, and
although they only approximately compensated for the
errors of his vision, they were better than nothing. (He
was to depend on them for more than a month.)

Dr. Sasaki worked without method, taking those who
were nearest him first, and he noticed soon that the cor-
ridor seemed to be getting more and more crowded.
Mixed in with the abrasions and lacerations which
most people in the hospital had suffered, he began to
fin d dreadful bums. He realized then that casualties
were pouring in from outdoors. There were so many
that he began to pass up the lightly wounded; he de-
cided that all he could hope to do was to stop people
from bleeding to death. Before long, patients lay and
crouched on the floors of the wards and the laboratories
and all the other rooms, and in the corridors, and on
the stairs, and in the front hall, and under -the porte-
cochere, and on the stone front steps, and in the driven

3 4

The Fire

way and courtyard, and for blocks each ^vay in the
streets outside. Wounded people supported maimed
people; disfigured families leaned together. Many peo-
ple were vomiting. A tremendous number of school-
girls— some of those who had been taken from their
classrooms to ivork outdoors, clearing fire lanes— crept
into the hospital. In a city of two hundred and forty-
five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had
been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thou-
sand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the
wounded made their way to the best hospital in town,
which was altogether unequal to such a trampling,
since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all
been occupied. The people in the suffocating crowd in-
side the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear,
''Sensei! Doctor!,” and the less seriously wounded came
and pulled at his sleeve and begged him to go to the
aid of the worse wounded. Tugged here and there in
his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, stag-
gered by so much raw flesh. Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of
profession and stopped working as a skillful surgeon
and a sympathetic man; he became an automaton,
mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daub-
ing, winding.

Some of the wounded in Hiroshima were unable to
enjoy the questionable luxury of hospitalization. In
what had been the personnel office of the East Asia Tin
Works, Miss Sasaki lay doubled over, unconscious,
under the tremendous pile of books and plaster and

35

HIROSHIMA

wood, and corrugated iron. She was wholly unconscious
(she later estimated) for about three hours. Her first
sensation was of dreadful pain in her left leg. It was so
black under the books and debris that the borderline
between awareness and unconsciousness was fine; she
apparently crossed it several times, for the pain seemed
to come and go. At the moments when it was sharpest,
she felt that her leg had been cut off somewhere below
the knee. Later, she heard someone walking on top of
the wreckage above her, and anguished voices spoke
up, evidently from within the mess around her: “Please
help! Get us out!”

Father Kleinsorge stemmed Father Schiffer's spurt-
ing cut as well as he could with some bandage that Dr.
Fujii had given the priests a few days before. When he
finished, he ran into the mission house again and found
the jacket of his military uniform and an old pair of
gray trousers. He put them on and went outside. A
woman from next door ran up to him and shouted that
her husband was buried under her house and the
house was on fire; Father Kleinsorge must come and
save him.

Father Kleinsorge, already growing apathetic and
dazed in the presence of the cumulative distress, said,
“We haven’t much time.” Houses all around were
burning, and the wind was now blowing hard. “Do you
know exactly which part of the house he is under?” he
asked.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Come quickly.”

3 6

The Fire

They went around to the house, the remains of
which blazed violently, but when they got there, it
turned out that the woman had no idea where her hus-
band was. Father Kleinsorge shouted several times, "‘Is
anyone there?'' There was no answer. Father Klein-
sorge said to the woman, “We must get away or we will
all die." He went back to the Catholic compound and
told the Father Superior that the fire was coming closer
on the wind, which had swung around and was now
from the north; it was time for everybody to go.

Just then, the kindergarten teacher pointed out to
the priests Mr. Fukai, the secretary of the diocese, who
was standing in his window on the second floor of the
mission house, facing in the direction of the explosion,
weeping. Father Cieslik, because he thought the stairs
unusable, ran around to the back of the mission house
to look for a ladder. There he heard people crying for
help under a nearby fallen roof. He called to passers-by
running away in the street to help him lift it, but no-
body paid any attention, and he had to leave the buried
ones to die. Father Kleinsorge ran inside the mission
house and scrambled up the stairs, which were awry
and piled with plaster and lathing, and called to Mr.
Fukai from the doorway of his room.

Mr. Fukai, a very short man of about fifty, turned
around slowly, with a queer look, and said, “Leave me
here."

Father Kleinsorge went into the room and took Mr.
Fukai by the collar of his coat and said, “Come with me
or you'll'die,"

3 7

HIROSHIMA

Mr. Fukai said, “Leave me here to die.”

Father Kleinsorge began to shove and haul Mr.
Fukai out of the room. Then the theological student
came up and grabbed Mr. Fukai’s feet, and Father
Kleinsorge took his shoulders, and together they car-
ried him downstairs and outdoors. “I can’t walk!” Mr.
Fukai cried. “Leave me here!” Father Kleinsorge got
his paper suitcase with the money in it and took Mr.
Fukai up pickaback, and the party started for the East
Parade Ground, their district’s “safe area.” As they
went out of the gate, Mr. Fukai, quite childlike now,
beat on Father Kleinsorge’s shoulders and said, “I
won’t leave. I won’t leave.” Irrelevantly, Father Klein-
sorge turned to Father LaSalle and said, “We have lost
all our possessions but not our sense of humor.”

The street was cluttered with parts of houses that
had slid into it, and with fallen telephone poles and
wires. From every second or third house came the voices
of people buried and abandoned, who invariably
screamed, with formal politeness, “Tasukete kure!
Help, if you please!” The priests recognized several
ruins from which these cries came as the homes of
friends, but because of the fire it was too late to help.
All the way, Mr. Fukai whimpered, “Let me stay.” The
party turned right when they came to a block of fallen
houses that was one flame. At Sakai Bridge, which
would take them across to the East Parade Ground,
they saw that the whole community on the opposite
side of the river was a sheet of fire; they dared not cross
and decided to take refuge in Asano Park, off to their

3 8

The Fire

left. Father Kleinsorge, who had been weakened for a
couple of days by his bad case of diarrhea, began to
stagger under his protesting burden, and as he tried to
climb up over the -wreckage of several houses that
blocked their way to the park, he stumbled, dropped
Mr. Fukai, and plunged down, head over heels, to the
edge of the river. When he picked himself up, he saw
Mr. Fukai running away. Father Kleinsorge shouted
to a dozen soldiers, who were standing by the bridge, to
stop him. As Father Kleinsorge started back to get Mr.
Fukai, Father LaSalle called out, “Hurry! Don’t waste
time!” So Father Kleinsorge just requested the soldiers
to take care of Mr. Fukai. They said they would, but the
little, broken man got away from them, and the last the
priests could see of him, he was running back toward
the fire.

Mr . Tanimoto, fearful for his family and church, at
first ran toward them by the shortest route, along Koi
Highway. He was the only person making his way into
the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were flee-
ing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some
way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin
hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of
pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in
both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many
were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some un-
dressed bodies, the burns had made patterns— of un-
dershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some
women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb

39

HIROSHIMA

and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the
skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their
kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, sup-
ported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had
their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent,
and shovv^ed no expression tvhatever.

After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, hav-
ing run the whole way, Mr. Xanimoto saw, as he ap-
proached the center, that all the houses had been
crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare
and their trunks were charred. He tried at several
points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always
stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for
help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that
day assisted only their relatives or immediate neigh-
bors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a
wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the
screams, and Mr. Xanimoto ran past them. As a Chris-
tian he was filled with compassion for those who were
trapped, and as a Japanese he was overwhelmed by the
shame of being unhurt, and he prayed as he ran, “God
help them and take them out of the fire.”

He thought he would skirt the fire, to the left. He
ran back to Kannon Bridge and followed for a distance
one of the rivers. He tried several cross streets, but
all were blocked, so he turned far left and ran out to
Yokogawa, a station on a railroad line that detoured
the city in a wide semicircle, and he followed the rails
until he came to a burning train. So impressed was he
by this time by the extent of the damage that he ran

40

The Fire

north two miles to Gion^ a suburb in the foothills. All
the way, he overtook dreadfully burned and lacerated
people, and in his guilt he turned to right and left as
he hurried and said to some of them, Excuse me for
having no burden like yours.” Near Gion, he be^^j^n
to meet country people going toward the'^i’C y " lo help,
and when they saw him, several exclaimed, “Look!
There is one who is not wounded.” At Gion, he bore
toward the right bank of the main river, the Ota, and
ran down it until he reached fire again. There was no
fire on the other side of the river, so he threw off his
shirt and shoes and plunged into it. In midstream,
where the current was fairly strong, exhaustion and
fear finally caught up with him— he had run nearly
seven miles— and he became limp and drifted in the
water. He prayed, “Please, God, help me to cross. It
would be nonsense for me to be drowned when I am
the only uninjured one.” He managed a few more
strokes and fetched up on a spit downstream.

Mr. Tanimoto climbed up the bank and ran along
it until, near a large Shinto shrine, he came to more
fire, and as he turned left to get around it, he met,
by incredible luck, his wife. She was carrying their
infant son. Mr. Tanimoto was now so emotionally
worn out that nothing could surprise him. He did not
embrace his wife; he simply said, “Oh, you are safe.”
She told him that she had got home from her night
in Ushida just in time for the explosion; she had been
buried under the parsonage with the baby in her arms.
She told how the wreckage had pressed down on her,

4 1

HIROSHIMA

how the baby had cried. She saw a chink of light, and
by reaching up with a hand, she worked the hole
bigger, bit by bit. After about half an hour, she heard
ihe crackling noise of wood burning. At last the open-
ii:g was big enough for her to push the baby out, and
afterward <i?e crawled out herself. She said she was
now going out to Ushida again. Mr. Tanimoto said he
wanted to see his church and take care of the people
of his Neighborhood Association. They parted as cas-
ually— as bewildered— as they had met.

Mr. Tanimoto’s way around the fire took him across
the East Parade Ground, which, being an evacuation
area, was now the scene of a gruesome review: rank
on rank of the burned and bleeding. Those who were
burned moaned, "‘Mizu„ mizu! Water, waterl’* Mr.
Tanimoto found a basin in a nearby street and located
a water tap that still worked in the crushed shell of a
house, and he began carrying water to the suffering
strangers. When he had given drink to about thirty
of them, he realized he was taking too much time. “Ex-
cuse me/’ he said loudly to those nearby who were
reaching out their hands to him and crying their thirst.
“I have many people to take care of.” Then he ran
away. He went to the river again, the basin in his hand,
and jumped down onto a sandspit. There he saw hun-
dreds of people so badly wounded that they could not
get up to go farther from the burning city. When they
saw a man erect and unhurt, the chant began again:
"'Mizuj mizu^ mizu” Mr. Tanimoto could not resist
them; he carried them water from the river— a mis-

4 ^

The Fire

take, since it was tidal and brackish. Two or three
small boats were ferrying hurt people across the river
from Asano Park, and when one touched the spit, Mr.
Tanimoto again made his loud, apologetic speech and
jumped into the boat. It took him across to the park.
There, in the underbrush, he found some of his
charges of the Neighborhood Association, who had
come there by his previous instructions, and saw many
acquaintances, among them Father Kleinsorge and the
other Catholics. But he missed Fukai, who had been
a close friend. ‘'Where is Fukai-5<37?r^ he asked.

“He didn’t want to come with us,” Father Klein-
sorge said. “He ran back.”

When Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people
caught along with her in the dilapidation at the tin
factory, she began speaking to them. Her nearest
neighbor, she discovered, was a high-school girl who
had been drafted for factory work, and who said her
back was broken. Miss Sasaki replied, “I am lying here
and I can't move. My left leg is cut off.”

Some time later, she again heard somebody walk
overhead and then move off to one side, and whoever
it was began burrowing. The digger released several
people, and when he had uncovered the high-school
girl, she found that her back was not broken, after all,
and she crawled out. Miss Sasaki spoke to the rescuer,
and he worked toward her. He pulled away a great
number of books, until he had made a tunnel to her.
She could see his perspiring face as he said, “Come

4 3

HIROSHIMA

out, Miss.” She tried. “I can’t move,” she said. The
man excavated some more and told her to try with
all her strength to get out. But books were heavy on
her hips, and the man finally saw that a bookcase
was leaning on the books and that a heavy beam
pressed down on the bookcase. “W^ait, he said. 1 11
get a crowbar.”

The man was gone a long time, and when he came
back, he was ill-tempered, as if her plight were all her
fault. “We have no men to help you!” he shouted in
through the tunnel. “You’ll have to get out by your-
self.”

“That’s impossible,” she said. “My left leg . .
The man went away.

Much later, several men came and dragged Miss
Sasaki out. Her left leg was not severed, but it was
badly broken and cut and it hung askew below the
knee. They took her out into a courtyard. It was rain-
ing. She sat on the ground in the rain. When the down-
pour increased, someone directed all the wounded
people to take cover in the factory’s air-raid shelters.
“Come along,” a tom-up woman said to her. “You can
hop.” But Miss Sasaki could not move, and she just
waited in the rain. Then a man propped up a large
sheet of corrugated iron as a kind of lean-to, and took
her in his arms and carried her to it. She was grateful
until he brought two horribly wounded people— a
woman with a whole breast sheared off and a man
whose face was all raw from a burn— to share thb simple
shed with her. No one came back. The rain cleared

44

The Fire

and the cloudy afternoon was hot; before nightfall the
three grotesques under the slanting piece of twisted
iron began to smell quite bad.

The former head of the Nobori-cho Neighborhood
Association to which the Catholic priests belonged
was an energetic man named Yoshida. He had boasted,
when he was in charge of the district air-raid defenses,
that fire might eat away all of Hiroshima but it would
never come to Nobori-cho. The bomb blew down his
house, and a joist pinned him by the legs, in full view
of the Jesuit mission house across the way and of the
people hurrying along the street. In their confusion
as they hurried past, Mrs. Nakamura, with her chil-
dren, and Father Kleinsorge, with Mr. Fukai on his
back, hardly saw him; he was just part of the general
blur of misery through which they moved. His cries
for help brought no response from them; there were
so many people shouting for help that they could not
hear him separately. They and all the others went
along. Nobori-cho became absolutely deserted, and
the fire swept through it. Mr. Yoshida saw the wooden
mission house— the only erect building in the area-
go up in a lick of flame, and the heat was terrific on
his face. Then flames came along his side of the street
and entered his house. In a paroxysm of terrified
strength, he freed himself and ran down the alleys of
Nobori-cho, hemmed in by the fire he had said would
never come. He began at once to behave like an old
man; two months later his hair was white.

4 5

HIROSHIMA

A s Dr. Fujii stood in the river up to his neck to avoid
the heat of the fire, the wind blew stronger and
stronger, and soon, even though tlie expanse of rv'ater
was small, the waves grew so high that the people
under the bridge could no longer keep their footing.
Dr. Fujii went close to the shore, crouched down, and
embraced a large stone with his usable arm. Later it
became possible to wade along the very edge of the
river, and Dr. Fujii and his two surviving nurses moved
about two hundred yards upstream, to a sandspit near
Asa n o Park. Many wounded were lying on the sand.
Dr. Machii was there with his family: his daughter,
who had been outdoors when the bomb burst, was
badly burned on her hands and legs but fortunately
not on her face. Although Dr. Fujii’s shoulder was by
now terribly painful, he examined the girl’s bums
curiously. Then he lay down. In spite of the misery all
around, he was ashamed of his appearance, and he
remarked to Dr. Machii that he looked like a beggar,
dressed as he was in nothing but tom and bloody
underwear. Later in the afternoon, when the fire be-
gan to subside, he decided to go to his parental house,
in the suburb of Nagatsuka. He asked Dr. Machii to
join him, but the Doctor answered that he and his
family were going to spend the night on the spit, be-
cause of his daughter’s injuries. Dr. Fujii, together
with his nurses, walked first to Ushida, where, in the
partially damaged house of some relatives, he found
first-aid materials he had stored there. The two nurses
bandaged him and he them. They went on. Now not

The Fire

many people walked in the streets, but a great num-
ber sat and lay on the pavement, vomited, waited for
death, and died. The number of corpses on the way
to Nagatsuka was more and more puzzling. The Doctor
wondered: Could a Molotov flower basket have done
all this?

Dr. Fujii reached his family’s house in the evening.
It was five miles from the center of town, but its roof
had fallen in and the windows were all broken.

All DAY, people poured into Asano Park, This pri-
vate estate was far enough away from the explosion so
that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still
alive, and the green place invited refugees— partly be-
cause they believed that if the Americans came back,
they would bomb only buildings; partly because the
foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the
estate’s exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their
quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese,
normal, secure; and also partly (according to some
who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic
urge to hide under leaves, Mrs. Nakamura and her
children were among the first to arrive, and they
settled in the bamboo grove near the river. They all
felt terribly thirsty, and they drank from the river.
At once they were nauseated and began vomiting, and
they retched the whole day. Others were also nau-
seated; they all thought (probably because of the
strong odor of ionization, an ''electric smell” given off
by the bomb’s fission) that they were sick from a gas

47

HIROSHIMA

the Americans had dropped. When Father Kleinsorge
and the other priests came into the park, nodding to
their friends as they passed, the Nakamuras were all
sick and prostrate. A woman named Iwasaki, who lived
in the neighborhood of the mission and who w^as sit-
ting near the Nakamuras, got up and asked the priests
if she should stay where she was or go with them.
Father Kleinsorge said, “I hardly know where the
safest place is.” She stayed there, and later in the day,
though she had no visible wounds or bums, she died.
The priests went farther along the river and settled
down in some underbrush. Father LaSalle lay down
and went right to sleep. The theological student, who
was wearing slippers, had carried with him a bundle
of clothes, in which he had packed two pairs of leather
shoes. When he sat down with the others, he found
that the bundle had broken open and a couple of
shoes had fallen out and now he had only two lefts.
He retraced his steps and found one right. When he
rejoined the priests, he said, ^‘It’s funny, but things
don’t matter any more. Yesterday, my shoes were my
most important possessions. Today, I don’t care. One
pair is enough.”

Father CiesKk said, “I know. I started to bring my
books along, and then I thought, 'This is no time for
books.’ ”

When Mr. Tanimoto, with his basin still in his
hand, reached the park, it was very crowded, and to
distinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for
most of the people lay still, with their eyes open. To

48

The Fire

Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the
grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely
wounded suffered together, was one of the most dread-
ful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience.
The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less
screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the
many who died did so noisily; not even the children
cried; very few people even spoke. And when Father
Kleinsorge gave water to some whose faces had been
almost blotted out by flash bums, they took their share
and then raised themselves a little and bowed to him,
in thanks.

Mr. Tanimoto greeted the priests and then looked
around for other friends. He saw Mrs. Matsumoto,
wife of the director of the Methodist School, and asked
her if she was thirsty. She was, so he went to one of the
pools in the Asanos’ rock gardens and got water for
her in his basin. Then he decided to try to get back to
his church. He went into Nobori-cho by the way the
priests had taken as they escaped, but he did not get
far; the fire along the streets was so fierce that he had
to turn back. He walked to the riverbank and began to
look for a boat in which he might carry some of the
most severely injured across the river from Asano Park
and away from the spreading fire. Soon he found a
good-sized pleasure punt drawn up on the bank, but in
and around it was an awful tableau — five dead men,
nearly naked, badly burned, who must have expired
more or less all at once, for they were in attitudes
which suggested that they had been working together

49

HIROSHIMA

to push the boat down into the river. Mr. Tanimoto
lifted them away from the boat, and as he did so, he
experienced such horror at disturbing the dead— pre-
venting them, he momentarily felt, from launching
their craft and going on their ghostly tvay— that he said
out loud, “Please forgive me for taking this boat. I
must use it for others, who are alive.” The punt was
heavy, but he managed to slide it into the water. There
were no oars, and all he could find for propulsion was
a thick bamboo pole. He worked the boat upstream to
the most crowded part of the park and began to ferry
the wounded. He could pack ten or twelve into the
boat for each crossing, but as the river was too deep in
the center to pole his way across, he had to paddle with
the bamboo, and consequently each trip took a very
long time. He worked several hours that way.

Early in the afternoon, the fire swept into the woods
of Asano Park. The first Mr. Tanimoto knew of it was
when, returning in his boat, he saw that a great number
of people had moved toward the riverside. On touch-
ing the bank, he went up to investigate, and when he
saw the fire, he shouted, “All the young men who
are not badly hurt come with me!” Father Kleinsorge
moved Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle close to the
edge of the river and asked people there to get them
across if the fire came too near, and then joined Tani-
moto’s volunteers. Mr. Tanimoto sent some to look for
buckets and basins and told others to beat the burning
underbrush with their clothes; when utensils were at
hand, he formed a bucket chain from one of the pools

5 o

The Fire

in the rock gardens. The team fought the fire for more
than two hours, and gradually defeated the flames. As
Mr. Tanimoto’s men worked, the frightened people in
the park pressed closer and closer to the river, and
finally the mob began to force some of the unfortunates
who were on the very bank into the water. Among
those driven into the river and drowned were Mrs.
Matsumoto, of the Methodist School, and her
daughter.

Wlien Father Kleinsorge got back after fighting the
fire, he found Father Schiffer still bleeding and terribly
pale. Some Japanese stood around and stared at him,
and Father Schiffer whispered, with a weak smile, ‘*It is
as if I were already dead.” *‘Not yet,” Father Klein-
sorge said. He had brought Dr. Fujii's first-aid kit with
him, and he had noticed Dr. Kanda in the crowd, so
he sought him out and asked him if he would dress
Father Schiffer’s bad cuts. Dr. Kanda had seen his wife
and daughter dead in the ruins of his hospital; he sat
now with his head in his hands. “"‘I can’t do anything,”
he said. Father Kleinsorge bound more bandage around
Father Schiffer’s head, moved him to a steep place, and
settled him so that his head was high, and soon the
bleeding diminished.

The roar of approaching planes was heard about this
time. Someone in the crowd near the Nakamura family
shouted, “It’s some Grummans coming to strafe usi”
A baker named Nakashima stood up and commanded,
“Everyone who is wearing anything white, take it off.”
Mrs. Nakamura took the blouses off her children, and

5 1

HIROSHIMA

opened her umbrella and made them get under it. A
great number of people, even badly burned ones,
crawled into bushes and. stayed there until the hum,
evidently of a reconnaissance or weather run, died
away.

It began to rain. Mrs. Nakamura kept her children
under the umbrella. The drops grew abnormally large,
and someone shouted, ''The Americans are dropping
gasoline. They're going to set fire to usl" (This alarm
stemmed from one of the theories being passed through
the park as to why so much of Hiroshima had burned:
it was that a single plane had sprayed gasoline on the
city and then somehow set fire to it in one flashing
moment.) But the drops were palpably water, and as
they fell, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and
suddenly — probably because of the tremendous con-
vection set up by the blazing city— a whirlwind ripped
through the park. Huge trees crashed down; small ones
were uprooted and flew into the air. Higher, a wild
array of flat things revolved in the twisting funnel-
pieces of iron roofing, papers, doors, strips of matting.
Father Kleinsorge put a piece of cloth over Father
Schiffer's eyes, so that the feeble man would not think
he was going crazy. The gale blew Mrs. Murata, the
mission housekeeper, who was sitting close by the river,
down the embankment at a shallow, rocky place, and
she came out with her bare feet bloody. The vortex
moved out onto the river, where it sucked up a water-
spout and eventually spent itself.

After the storm, Mr. Tanimoto began ferrying

5 2

The Fire

people again, and Father Kleinsorge asked the theo-
logical student to go across and make his way out to
the Jesuit Novitiate at Nagatsuka, about three miles
from the center of town, and to request the priests
there to come with help for Fathers SchifFer and La-
Salle. The student got into Mr. Tanimoto*s boat and
went off with him. Father Kleinsorge asked Mrs. Naka-
mura if she would like to go out to Nagatsuka with the
priests when they came. She said she had some luggage
and her children were sick— they were still vomiting
from time to time, and so, for that matter, was she—
and therefore she feared she could not. He said he
thought the fathers from the Novitiate could come
back the next day with a pushcart to get her.

Late in the afternoon, when he went ashore for a
while, Mr. Tanimoto, upon whose energy and initia-
tive many had come to depend, heard people begging
for food. He consulted Father Kleinsorge, and they de-
cided to go back into town to get some rice from Mr.
Tanimoto’s Neighborhood Association shelter and
from the mission shelter. Father Cieslik and two or
three others went with them. At first, when they got
among the rows of prostrate houses; they did not know
where they were; the change was too sudden, from a
busy city of two hundred and forty-five thousand that
morning to a mere pattern of residue in the after-
noon. The asphalt of the streets was still so soft and
hot from the fires that walking was uncomfortable.
They encountered only one person, a woman, who said
to them as they passed, *'My husband is in those ashes.’’

5 3

HIROSHIMA

At the mission, where Mr. Tanimoto left the party.
Father Kleinsorge was dismayed to see the building
razed. In the garden, on the way to the shelter, he no-
ticed a pumpkin roasted on die vine. He and Father
Cieslik tasted it and it was good. They were surprised
at their hunger, and they ate quite a bit. They got out
several bags of rice and gathered up several other
cooked pumpkins and dug up some potatoes that were
nicely baked under the ground, and started back. Mr.
Tanimoto rejoined them on the way. One of the people
with him had some cooking utensils. In the park, Mr.
Tanimoto organized the lightly wounded women of
his neighborhood to cook. Father Kleinsorge offered
the Nakamura family some pumpkin, and they tried it,
but they could not keep it on their stomachs. Alto-
gether, the rice was enough to feed nearly a hundred
people.

Just before dark, Mr. Tanimoto came across a
twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, the Tanimoto’s next-
door neighbor. She was crouching on the ground with
the body of her infant daughter in her arms. The baby
had evidently been dead all day. Mrs. Kamai jumped
up when she saw Mr. Tanimoto and said, ‘‘Would you
please try to locate my husband?”

Mr, Tanimoto knew that her husband had been in-
ducted into the Army just the day before; he and Mrs,
Tanimoto had entertained Mrs. Kamai in the after-
noon, to make her forget. Kamai had reported to the
Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters-near the an-
cient castle in the middle of town— where some four

54

thousand troops were stationed. Judging by the many
maimed soldiers Mr, Tanimoto had seen during the
day, he surmised that the barracks had been badly
damaged by whatever it was that had hit Hiroshima.
He knew' he hadn’t a chance of finding Mrs. Kamai’s
husband, even if he searched, but he wanted to humor
her. ‘I’ll try,” he said.

“You’ve got to find him,” she said. “He loved our
baby so much. I want him to see her once more.”

Ill Details Are Being Investigated

E arly in the evening of the day the bomb ex-
ploded, a Japanese naval launch moved slowly up
and down the seven rivers of Hiroshima. It stopped
here and there to make an announcement— alongside
the crowded sandspits, on which hundreds of wounded
lay; at the bridges, on which others were crowded; and
eventually, as twilight fell, opposite Asano Park. A
young officer stood up in the launch and shouted
through a megaphone, “Be patient! A naval hospital
ship is coming to take care of you!*' The sight of the
shipshape launch against the background of the havoc
across the river; the unruffled young man in his neat
uniform; above all, the promise of medical help — the
first word of possible succor anyone had heard in
nearly twelve awful hours— cheered the people in the
park tremendously. Mrs, Nakamura settled her family
for the night with the assurance that a doctor would

Details Are Being Investigated

come and stop their retching. Mr. Tanimoto resumed
ferrying the wounded across the river. Father Klein-
sorge lay down and said the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail
Mary to himself, and fell right asleep; but no sooner
had he dropped off than Mrs. Murata, the conscientious
mission housekeeper, shook him and said, "Father
Kleinsorgel Did you remember to repeat your evening
prayers?” He answered rather grumpily, "Of course/*
and he tried to go back to sleep but could not. This,
apparently, was just what Mrs. Murata wanted. She
began to chat with the exhausted priest. One of the
questions she raised was when he thought the priests
from the Novitiate, for whom he had sent a messenger
in midafternoon, would arrive to evacuate Father Su-
perior LaSalle and Father Schiffer.

The messenger Father Kleinsorge had sent— the theo-
logical student who had been living at the mission
house— had arrived at the Novitiate, in the hills about
three miles out, at half past four. The sixteen priests
there had been doing rescue work in the outskirts; they
had worried about their colleagues in the city but had
not known how or where to look for them. Now they
hastily made two litters out of poles and boards, and
the student led half a dozen of them back into the
devastated area. They worked their way along the
Ota above the city; twice the heat of the fire forced
them into the river. At Misasa Bridge, they encoun-
tered a long line of soldiers making a bizarre forced
march away from the Chugoku Regional Army Head-

HIROSHIMA

quarters in the center of tlie town. All w^ere gro-
tesquely burned, and they supported themselves with
staves or leaned on one another. Sick, burned horses,
hanging their heads, stood on the bridge. When the
rescue party reached the park, it was after dark, and
progress was made extremely difficult by the tangle of
fallen trees of all sizes tliat had been knocked down by
the whirlwind that afternoon. At last— not long after
Mrs. Murata asked her question— they reached their
friends, and gave them wine and strong tea.

The priests discussed how to get Father Schiflfer and
Father LaSalle out to the Novitiate. They were afraid
that blundering through the park with them would
jar them too much on the wooden litters, and that the
wounded men would lose too much blood. Father
Kleinsorge thought of Mr. Tanimoto and his boat, and
called out to him on the river. When Mr. Tanimoto
reached the bank, he said he would be glad to take the
injured priests and their bearers upstream to where
they could find a clear roadway. The rescuers put
Father Schiffer onto one of the stretchers and lowered
it into the boat, and two of them went aboard with it.
Mr. Tanimoto, who still had no oars, poled the punt
upstream.

About half an hour later, Mr. Tanimoto came back
and excitedly asked the remaining priests to help him
rescue two children he had seen standing up to their
shoulders in the river. A group went out and picked
them up — two young girls who had lost their family

58

Details Are Being Investigated

and were both badly burned. The priests stretched
them on the ground next to Father Kleinsorge and
then embarked Father LaSalle. Father Cieslik thought
he could make it out to the Novitiate on foot, so he
went aboard with the others. Father Kleinsorge was too
feeble; he decided to wait in the park until the next
day. He asked the men to come back with a hand-
<^rt, so that they could take Mrs. Nakamura and her
sick children to the Novitiate.

Mr. Tanimoto shoved oflE again. As the boatload of
priests moved slowly upstream, they heard weak cries
for help. A woman’s voice stood out especially: ‘'There
are people here about to be drowned! Help usi The
water is risingl” The sounds came from one of the
sandspits, and those in the punt could see, in the re-
flected light of the still-burning fires, a number of
wounded people lying at the edge of the river, already
partly covered by the flooding tide. Mr. Tanimoto
wanted to help them, but the priests were afraid that
Father Schiffer would die if they didn’t hurry, and
they urged their ferryman along. He dropped them
where he had put Father Schiffer down and then started
back alone toward the sandspit.

The night was hot, and it seemed even hotter be-
cause of the fires against the sky, but the younger of
the two girls Mr. Tanimoto and the priests had res-
cued complained to Father Kleinsorge that she was
cold. He covered her with his jacket. She and her older

HIROSHIMA

sister had been in the salt tvater of the river for a
couple of hours before being rescued. The younger one
had huge, raw flash bums on her body; the salt water
must have been excruciatingly painful to her. She
began to shiver heavily, and again said it was cold.
Father Kleinsorge borrowed a blanket from someone
nearby and wrapped her up, but she shook more and
more, and said again, “I am so cold,” and then she
suddenly stopped shivering and was dead.

Ma. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women
on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and
urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he
realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He
reached down and took a woman by the hands, but
her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was
so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a mo-
ment, Then he got out into the water and, though a
small man, lifted several of the men and women, who
were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts
were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the
great bums he had seen during the day had been like:
yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin
sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated
and smelly. With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was
now too short and he had to paddle most of the way
across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he
lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up
the slope away from the tide. He had to keep con-

6 0

Details Are Being Investigated

sciously repeating to himself, ^‘These are human be-
ings/’ It took him three trips to get them all across the
riven When he had finished, he decided he had to have
a rest, and he went back to the park.

As Mr. Tanimoto stepped up the dark bank, he
tripped over someone, and someone else said angrily,
“Look out! That’s my hand.” Mr. Tanimoto, ashamed
of hurting wounded people, embarrassed at being able
to walk upright, suddenly thought of the naval hos-
pital ship, which had not come (it never did), and he
had for a moment a feeling of blind, murderous rage at
the crew of the ship, and then at all doctors. Why
didn’t they come to help these people?

Dr. Fujii lay in dreadful pain throughout the night
on the floor of his family’s roofless house on the edge
of the city. By the light of a lantern, he had examined
himself and found; left clavicle fractured; multiple
abrasions and lacerations of face and body, including
deep cuts on the chin, back, and legs; extensive con-
tusions on chest and trunk; a couple of ribs possibly
fractured. Had he not been so badly hurt, he might
have been at Asano Park, assisting the wounded.

By nightfall, ten thousand victims of the explosion
had invaded the Red Cross Hospital, and Dr. Sasaki,
worn out, was moving aimlessly and dully up and down
the stinking corridors with wads of bandage and bottles
of mercurochrome, still wearing the glasses he had

HIROSHIMA

taken from the wounded nurse, binding up the worst
cuts as he came to them. Other doctors were putting
compresses of saline solution on the worst bums. That
was all they could do. After dark, they worked by the
light of the city’s fires and by candles the ten remain-
ing nurses held for them. Dr. Sasaki had not looked
outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so
terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to
him to ask any questions about what had happened be-
yond the windows and doors. Ceilings and partitions
had fallen; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were every-
where. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there
was nobody to carry away the corpses. Some of the hos-
pital staff distributed biscuits and rice balls, but the
chamel-house smell was so strong that few were hun-
gry. By three o’clock the next morning, after nineteen
straight hours of his gruesome work. Dr. Sasaki was
incapable of dressing another wound. He and some
other survivors of the hospital staff got straw mats and
went outdoors— thousands of patients and hundreds of
dead were in the yard and on the driveway— and hur-
ried around behind the hospital and lay down in hiding
to snatch some sleep. But within an hour wounded peo^
pie had found them; a complaining circle formed
around them: ‘'Doctors! Help us! How can you sleep?”
Dr. Sasaki got up again and went back to work. Early
in the day, he thought for the first time of his mother,
at their country home in Mukaihara, thirty miles from
town. He usually went home every night. He was afraid
she would think he was dead.

6 2

Details Are Being Investigated

Near the spot upriver to which Mr. Tanimoto had
transported the priests, there sat a large case of rice
cakes which a rescue party had evidently brought for
the wounded lying thereabouts but hadn’t distributed.
Before evacuating the wounded priests, the others
passed the cakes around and helped themselves. A few
minutes later, a band of soldiers came up, and an officer,
hearing the priests speaking a foreign language, drew
his sword and hysterically asked who they were. One of
the priests calmed him down and explained that they
were Germans— allies. The officer apologized and said
that there were reports going around that American
parachutists had landed.

The priests decided that they should take Father
Schiffer first. As they prepared to leave. Father Superior
LaSalle said he felt awfully cold. One of the Jesuits
gave up his coat, another his shirt; they were glad to
wear less in the muggy night. The stretcher bearers
started out. The theological student led the way and
tried to warn the others of obstacles, but one of the
priests got a foot tangled in some telephone wire and
tripped and dropped his comer pf the litter. Father
Schiffer rolled off, lost consciousness, came to, and then
vomited. The bearers picked him up and went on with
him to the edge of the city, where they had arranged to
meet a relay of other priests, left him with them, and
turned back and got the Father Superior.

The wooden litter must have been terribly painful
for Father LaSalle, in whose back scores of tiny parti-
cles of window glass were embedded. Near the edge of

63

HIROSHIMA

town, the group had to walk around an automobile
burned and squatting on the narrow road, and the bear-
ers on one side, unable to see their way in the darkness,
fell into a deep ditch. Father LaSalle xvas thrown onto
the ground and the litter broke in two. One priest went
ahead to get a handcart from the Novitiate, but he soon
found one beside an empty house and wheeled it back.
The priests lifted Father LaSalle into the cart and
pushed him over the bumpy road the rest of the way.
The rector of the Novitiate, who had been a doctor
before he entered the religious order, cleaned the
wounds of the two priests and put them to bed between
clean sheets, and they thanked God for the care they
had received.

Thousands of people had nobody to help them. Miss
Sasaki was one of them. Abandoned and helpless, under
the crude lean-to in the courtyard of the tin factory,
beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man
whose burned face was scarcely a face any more, she
sufiEered awfully that night from the pain in her broken
leg. She did not sleep at all; neither did she converse
with her sleepless companions.

In the park, Mrs. Murata kept Father Kleinsorge
awake all night by talking to him. None of the Naka-
mura family were able to sleep, either; the children, in
spite of being very sick, were interested in everything
that happened. They were delighted when one of the
city’s gas-storage tanks went up in a tremendous burst

64

Details Are Being Investigated

of flame. Toshio, the boy, shouted to the others to look
at the reflection in the river. Mr. Tanimoto, after his
long run and his many hours of rescue work, dozed
uneasily. When he awoke, in the first light of dawn, he
looked across the river and saw that he had not carried
the festered, limp bodies high enough on the sandspit
the night before. The tide had risen above where he
had put them; they had not had the strength to move;
they must have drowned. He saw a number of bodies
floating in the river.

Early that day, August 7th, the Japanese radio broad-
cast for the first time a succinct announcement that very
few, if any, of the people most concerned with its con-
tent, the survivors in Hiroshima, happened to hear:
‘"Hiroshima suffered considerable damage as the result
of an attack by a few B-29S. It is believed that a new
type of bomb was used. The details are being investi-
gated,'" Nor is it probable that any of the survivors hap-
pened to be tuned in on a short-wave rebroadcast of
an extraordinary announcement by the President of
the United States, which identified the new bomb as
atomic: “That bomb had more power than twenty,
thousand tons of TNT. It had more than two thou-
sand times the blast power of the British Grand Slam,
which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of
warfare.” Those victims who were able to worry at all
about what had happened thought of it and discussed
it in more primitive, childish terms— gasoline sprin-
kled from an airplane, maybe, or some combustible

HIROSHIMA

gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries, or the work of para-
chutists; but, even if they had known the truth, most
of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to
care that they were the objects of the first great experi-
ment in the use of atomic power, which (as the voices
on the short wave shouted) no country except the
United States, with its industrial know-how, its will-
ingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an
important wartime gamble, could possibly have de-
veloped.

Mr . Tanimoto was still angry at doctors. He decided
that he would personally bring one to Asano Park—by
the scrufiE of the neck, if necessary. He crossed the river,
went past the Shinto shrine where he had met his wife
for a brief moment the day before, and walked to the
East Parade Ground. Since this had long before been
designated as an evacuation area, he thought he would
find an aid station there. He did find one, operated by
an Army medical unit, but he also saw that its doctors
were hopelessly overburdened, with thousands of pa-
tients sprawled among corpses across the field in front
of it. Nevertheless, he went up to one of the Army doc-
tors and said, as reproachfully as he could, **Why have
you not come to Asano Park? You are badly needed
there.’"

Without even looking up from his work, the doctor
said in a tired voice, ‘'This is my station.”

"But there are many dying on the riverbank over
there.”

66

Details Are Being Investigated

“The first duty/’ the doctor said, “is to take care o£
the slightly wounded.”

“Why— when there are many who are heavily wound-
ed on the riverbank?”

The doctor moved to another patient. “In an emer-
gency like this,” he said, as if he were reciting from a
manual, “the first task is to help as many as possible—
to save as many lives as possible. There is no hope for
the heavily wounded. Tfrey will die. We can’t bother
with them.”

“That may be right from a medical standpoint—”
Mr. Tanimoto began, but then he looked out across
the field, where the many dead lay close and intimate
with those who were still living, and he turned away
without finishing his sentence, angry now with himself.
He didn’t know what to do; he had promised some of
the dying people in the park that he would bring them
medical aid. They might die feeling cheated. He saw a
ration stand at one side of the field, and he went to it
and begged some rice cakes and biscuits, and he took
them back, in lieu of doctors, to the people in the
park.

The morning, again, was hot. Father Kleinsorge went
to fetch water for the wounded in a bottle and a teapot
he had borrowed. He had heard that it was possible to
get fresh tap water outside Asano Park. Going through
the rock gardens, he had to climb over and crawl under
the trunks of fallen pine trees; he found he was weak.
There were many dead in the gardens. At a beautiful

moon bridge, he passed a naked, living woman who
seemed to have been burned from head to toe and was
red all over. Near the entrance to the park, an Army
doctor was working, but the only medicine he had was
iodine, which he painted over cuts, bruises, slimy
burns, everything—and by now everything that he
painted had pus on it Outside the gate of the park.
Father Kleinsorge found a faucet that still worked—
part of the plumbing of a vanished house— and he filled
his vessels and returned. When he had given the
wounded the water, he made a second trip. This time,
the woman by the bridge was dead. On his way back
with the water, he got lost on a detour around a fallen
tree, and as he looked for his way through the woods,
he heard a voice ask from the underbrush, ‘‘Have you
anything to drink?"' He saw a uniform. Thinking there
was just one soldier, he approached with the water.
When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were
about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the
same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned,
their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their
melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must
have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off;
perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel.) Their
mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which
they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the
spout of the teapot. So Father Kleinsorge got a large
piece of grass and drew out the stem so as to make a
straw, and gave them all water to drink that way. One

Details Are Being Investigated

of them said, “I can’t see anything.” Father Kleinsorge
answered, as cheerfully as he could, “There’s a doctor
at the entrance to the park. He’s busy now, but he’ll
come soon and fix your eyes, I hope.”

Since that day. Father Kleinsorge has thought back
to how queasy he had once been at the sight of pain,
how someone else’s cut finger used to make him turn
faint. Yet there in the park he was so benumbed that
immediately after leaving this horrible sight he stopped
on a path by one of the pools and discussed with a
lightly wounded man whether it would be safe to eat
the^ fat, two-foot carp that floated dead on the surface
of the water. They decided, after some consideration,
that it would be unwise.

Father Kleinsorge filled the containers a third time
and went back to tire riverbank. There, amid the dead
and dying, he saw a young woman with a needle and
thread mending her kimono, which had been slightly
torn. Father Kleinsorge joshed her. “My, but you’re a
dandy!” he said. She laughed.

He felt tired and lay down. He began to talk with
two engaging children whose acquaintance he had
made the afternoon before. He learned that their name
was Kataoka; the girl was thirteen, the boy five. The
girl had been just about to set out for a barbershop
when the bomb fell. As the family started for Asano
Park, their mother decided to turn back for some food
and extra clothing; they became separated from her in
the qpowd of fleeing people, and they had not seen her

69

HIROSHIMA

since. Occasionally they stopped suddenly in their per-
fectly cheerful playing and began to cry for their
mother.

It was difficult for all the children in the park to sus-
tain the sense of tragedy. Toshio Nakamura got quite
excited when he saw his friend Seichi Sato riding up the
river in a boat r\rith his family, and he ran to the bank
and waved and shouted, ‘'Sato! Sato!”

The boy turned his head and shouted, “Who’s
that?”

“Nakamura.”

“Hello, Toshiol”

“Are you all safe?”

“Yes. What about you?”

“Yes, we’re all right. My sisters are vomiting, but I’m
fine.”

Father Kleinsorge began to be thirsty in the dreadful
heat, and he did not feel strong enough to go for water
again. A little before noon, he saw a Japanese woman
handing something out. Soon she came to him and said
in a kindly voice, “These are tea leaves. Chew them,
young man, and you won’t feel thirsty.” The woman’s
gentleness made Father Kleinsorge suddenly want to
cry. For weeks, he had been feeling oppressed by the
hatred of foreigners that the Japanese seemed increas-
ingly to show, and he had been uneasy even with his
Japanese friends. This stranger’s gesture made him a
little hysterical.

Around noon, the priests arrived from the Novitiate
with the handcart. They had been to the site of the

70

Details Are Being Investigated

mission house in the city and had retrieved some suit-
cases that had been stored in the air-raid shelter and had
also picked up the remains of melted holy vessels in the
ashes of the chapel. They now packed Father Klein-
sorge’s papier-mach6 suitcase and the things belonging
to Mrs. Murata and the Nakamuras into the cart, put
the two Nakamura girls aboard, and prepared to start
out. Then one of the Jesuits who had a practical turn
of mind remembered that they had been notified some
time before that if they sufiEered property damage at the
hands of the enemy, they could enter a claim for com-
pensation with the prefectural police. The holy men
discussed this matter there in the park, with the
wounded as silent as the dead around them, and de-
cided that Father Kleinsorge, as a former resident of the
destroyed mission, was the one to enter the claim. So,
as the others went off with the handcart. Father Klein-
sorge said goodbye to the Kataoka children and trudged
to a police station. Fresh, clean-uniformed policemen
from another town were in charge, and a crowd of dirty
and disarrayed citizens crowded around them, mostly
asking after lost relatives. Father Kleinsorge filled out
a claim form and started walking through the center of
the town on his way to Nagatsuka. It was then that he
first realized the extent of the damage; he passed block
after block of ruins, and even after all he had seen in the
park, his breath was taken away. By the time he reached
the Novitiate, he was sick with exhaustion. The last
thing he did as he fell into bed was request that some-
one go back for the motherless Kataoka children.

HIROSHIMA

Altogether, Miss Sasaki was left two days and two
nights under the piece of propped-up roofing with her
crushed leg and her two unpleasant comrades. Her only
diversion was when men came to the factory air-raid
shelters, which she could see from under one comer of
her shelter, and hauled corpses up out of them with
ropes. Her leg became discolored, swollen, and putrid.
All that time, she went without food and water. On the
third day, August 8th, some friends who supposed she
was dead came to look for her body and found her.
They told her that her mother, father, and baby
brother, who at the time of the explosion were in the
Tamura Pediatric Hospital, where the baby was a pa-
tient, had all been given up as certainly dead, since the
hospital was totally destroyed. Her friends then left her
to think that piece of news over. Later, some men
picked her up by the arms and legs and carried her
quite a distance to a truck. For about an hour, the
truck moved over a bumpy road, and Miss Sasaki, who
had become convinced that she was dulled to pain, dis-
covered that she was not. The men lifted her out at a
relief station in the section of Inokuchi, where two
Army doctors looked at her. The moment one of them
touched her wound, she fainted. She came to in time to
hear them discuss whether or not to cut off her leg; one
said there was gas gangrene in the lips of the wound and
predicted she would die unless they amputated, and the
other said that was too bad, because they had no equip-
ment with which to do the job. She fainted again. When
she recovered consciousness, she was being carried

Details Are Being Investigated

somewhere on a stretcher. She was put aboard a launch,
which went to the nearby island o£ Ninoshima, and she
was taken to a military hospital there. Another doctor
examined her and said that she did not have gas gan-
grene, though she did have a fairly ugly compound
fracture. He said quite coldly that he was sorry, but
this was a hospital for operative surgical cases only, and
because she had no gangrene, she would have to return
to Hiroshima that night. But then the doctor took her
temperature, and what he saw on the thermometer
made him decide to let her stay.

That day, August 8th, Father Cieslik went into the
city to look for Mr. Fukai, the Japanese secretary of the
diocese, who had ridden unwillingly out of the flaming
city on Father Kleinsorge’s back and then had run back
crazily into it. Father Cieslik started hunting in the
neighborhood of Sakai Bridge, where the Jesuits had
last seen Mr. Fukai; he went to the East Parade Ground,
the evacuation area to which the secretary might have
gone, and looked for him among the wounded and dead
there; he went to the prefectural police and made in-
quiries. He could not find any trace of the man. Back
at the Novitiate that evening, the theological student,
who had been rooming with Mr. Fukai at the mission
house, told the priests that the secretary had remarked
to him, during an air-raid alarm one day not long be-
fore the bombing, ‘"Japan is dying. If there is a real air
raid here in Hiroshima, I want to die with our coun-
try.” The priests concluded that Mr. Fukai had run

HIROSHIMA

back to immolate himself in the flames. They never saw
him again.

At THE Red Cross Hospital, Dr. Sasaki worked for
three straight days with only one hour's sleep. On the
second day, he began to sew up the worst cuts, and right
through the following night and all the next day he
stitched. Many of the wounds were festered. Fortu-
nately, someone had found intact a supply of naruco-
pon, a Japanese sedative, and he gave it to many who
were in pain. Word went around among the staff that
there must have been something peculiar about the
great bomb, because on the second day the vice-chief of
the hospital went down in the basement to the vault
where the X-ray plates were stored and found the whole
stock exposed as they lay. That day, a fresh doctor and
ten nurses came in from the city of Yamaguchi with
extra bandages and antiseptics, and the third day an-
other physician and a dozen more nurses arrived from
Matsue— yet there were still only eight doctors for ten
thousand patients. In the afternoon of the third day,
exhausted from his foul tailoring. Dr. Sasaki became
obsessed with the idea that his mother thought he was
dead. He got permission to go to Mukaihara. He
walked out to the first suburbs, beyond which the
electric train service was still functioning, and reached
home late in the evening. His mother said she had
known he was all right all along; a wounded nurse had
stopped by to tell her. He went to bed and slept for
seventeen hours.

7 4

Details Are Being Investigated

Before dawn on August 8th, someone entered the
room at the Novitiate where Father Kleinsorge was in
bed, reached up to tlie hanging light bulb, and switched
it on. The sudden flood of light, pouring in on Father
Kleinsorge’s half sleep, brought him leaping out of bed,
braced for a new concussion. When he realized what
had happened, he laughed confusedly and went back
to bed. He stayed there all day.

On August gth, Father Kleinsorge was still tired.
The rector looked at his cuts and said they were not
even worth dressing, and if Father Kleinsorge kept
them clean, they would heal in three or four days.
Father Kleinsorge felt uneasy; he could not yet compre-
hend what he had been through; as if he were guilty of
something awful, he felt he had to go back to the scene
of the violence he had experienced. He got up out of
bed and walked into the city. He scratched for a while
in the ruins of the mission house, but he found noth-
ing. He went to the sites of a couple of schools and asked
after people he knew. He looked for some of the city s
Japanese Catholics, but he found only fallen houses*
He walked back to the Novitiate, stupefied and without
any new understanding.

At two minutes after eleven o’clock on the morning
of August gth, the second atomic bomb was dropped,
on Nagasaki. It was several days before the survivo|:^ of
Hiroshima knew they had company, because the Japa-
nese radio and newspapers were being extremely cau-
tious on the subject of the strange weapon.

HIROSHIMA

On August qth, Mr. Tanimoto was still working in
the park. He went to the suburb of Ushida, where his
wife was staying with friends, and got a tent which he
had stored there before the bombing. He now took it
to the park and set it up as a shelter for some of the
wounded ■^vho could not move or be moved. Whatever
he did in the park, he felt he was being watched by the
twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, his former neighbor,
whom he had seen on the day the bomb exploded, with
her dead baby daughter in her arms. She kept the small
corpse in her arms for four days, even though it began
smelling bad on the second day. Once, Mr. Xanimoto
sat with her for a while, and she told him that the bomb
had buried her under their house with the baby
strapped to her back, and that when she had dug herself
free, she had discovered that the baby was choking, its
mouth full of dirt. With her little finger, she had care-
fully cleaned out the infant’s mouth, and for a time the
child had breathed normally and seemed all right; then
suddenly it had died. Mrs. Kamai also talked about
what a fine man her husband was, and again urged
Mr. Tanimoto to search for him. Since Mr. Tanimoto
had been all through the city the first day and had seen
terribly burned soldiers from Kamai’s post, the Chu-
goku Regional Army Headquarters, everywhere, he
knew it would be impossible to find Kamai, even if he
were living, but of course he didn’t tell her that. Every
time she saw Mr. Xanimoto, she asked whether he had
found her husband. Once, he tried to suggest that per-
haps it was time to cremate the baby, but Mrs. Kamai

Details Are Being Investigated

only held it tighter. He began to keep away from her,
but whenever he looked at her, she was staring at him
and her eyes asked the same question. He tried to escape
her glance by keeping his back turned to her as much
as possible.

The Jesuits took about fifty refugees into the exqui-
site chapel of the Novitiate. The rector gave them what
medical care he could— mostly just the cleaning away
of pus. Each of the Nakamuras was provided with a
blanket and a mosquito net. Mrs. Nakamura and her
younger daughter had no appetite and ate nothing; her
son and other daughter ate, and lost, each meal they
were offered. On August loth, a friend, Mrs. Osaki,
came to see them and told them that her son Hideo had
been burned alive in the factory where he worked. This
Hideo had been a kind of hero to Toshio, who had
often gone to the plant to watch him run his machine.
That night, Toshio woke up screaming. He had
dreamed that he had seen Mrs. Osaki coming out of an
opening in the ground with her family, and then he
saw Hideo at his machine, a big one with a revolving
belt, and he himself was standing beside Hideo, and
for some reason this was terrifying.

On August ioth. Father Kleinsorge, having heard
from someone that Dr. Fujii had been injured and
that he had eventually gone to the summer house of
a friend of his named Okuma, in the village of Fu-
kawa, asked Father Cieslik if he would go and see

HIROSHIMA

how Dr. Fujii was. Father Cieslik went to Misasa sta-
tion, outside Hiroshima, rode for twenty minutes on
an electric train, and then walked for an hour and a
half in a terribly hot sun to Mr. Okuma’s house, which
was beside the Ota River at the foot of a mountain. He
found Dr. Fujii sitting in a chair in a kimono, apply-
ing compresses to his broken collarbone. The Doctor
told Father Cieslik about having lost his glasses and
said that his eyes bothered him. He showed the priest
huge blue and green stripes where beams had bruised
him. He offered the Jesuit first a cigarette and then
whiskey, though it was only eleven in the morning.
Father Cieslik thought it would please Dr. Fujii if he
took a little, so he said yes. A servant brought some
Suntory whiskey, and the Jesuit, the Doctor, and the
host had a very pleasant chat. Mr. Okuma had lived
in Hawaii, and he told some things about Americans.
Dr. Fujii talked a bit about the disaster. He said that
Mr. Okuma and a nurse had gone into the ruins of
his hospital and brought back a small safe which he
had moved into his air-raid shelter. This contained
some surgical instruments, and Dr. Fujii gave Father
Cieslik a few pairs of scissors and tweezers for the rec-
tor at the Novitiate. Father Cieslik was bursting with
some inside dope he had, but he waited until the con-
versation turned naturally to the mystery of the bomb.
Then he said he knew what kind of bomb it was; he
had the secret on the best authority— that of a Japanese
newspaperman who had dropped in at the Novitiate.
The bomb was not a bomb at all; it was a kind of fine

7 8

Details Are Being Investigated

magnesium powder sprayed over the whole city by a
single plane, and it exploded when it came into con-
tact with the live wires of the city power system. “That
means,” said Dr. Fujii, perfectly satisfied, since after
all the information came from a newspaperman, “that
it can only be dropped on big cities and only in the
daytime, when the tram lines and so forth are in
operation,”

After five days of ministering to the wounded in
the park, Mr. Tanimoto returned, on August i ith, to
his parsonage and dug around in the ruins. He re-
trieved some diaries and church records that had been
kept in books and were only charred around the edges,
as well as some cooking utensils and pottery. While he
was at work, a Miss Tanaka came and said that her
father had been asking for him. Mr. Tanimoto had
reason to hate her father, the retired shipping-com-
pany official who, though he made a great show of
his charity, was notoriously selfish and cruel, and who,
just a few days before the bombing, had said openly
to several people that Mr. Tanimoto was a spy for the
Americans. Several times he had derided Christianity
and called it un-Japanese. At the moment of the
bombing, Mr. Tanaka had been walking in the street
in front of the city’s radio station. He received serious
flash bums, but he was able to walk home. He took
refuge in his Neighborhood Association shelter and
from there tried hard to get medical aid. He expected
all the doctors of Hiroshima to come to him, because

HIROSHIMA

he was so rich and so famous for giving his money
away. When none of them came, he angrily set out to
look for them; leaning on his daughter’s arm, he
walked from private hospital to private hospital, but
all were in ruins, and he went back and lay down in
the shelter again. Now he was very weak and knew he
was going to die. He was willing to be comforted by
any religion.

Mr. Tanimoto went to help him. He descended into
the tomblike shelter and, when his eyes were adjusted
to the darkness, saw Mr. Tanaka, his face and arms
puffed up and covered with pus and blood, and his
eyes swollen shut. The old man smelled very bad, and
he moaned constantly. He seemed to recognize Mr.
Tanimoto’s voice. Standing at the shelter stairway to
get light, Mr. Tanimoto read loudly from a Japanese-
language pocket Bible: "Tor a thousand years in Thy
sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a
watch in the night. Thou carriest the children of men
away as with a flood; they are as a sleep; in the morn-
ing they are like grass which groweth up. In the inorn-
ing it flourisheth and groweth up; in the evening it is
cut down, and withereth. For we are consumed by
Thine anger and by Thy wrath are we troubled. Thou
hast set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in
the light of Thy countenance. For all our days are
passed away in Thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale
that is told. , .

Mr. Tanaka died as Mr. Tanimoto read the
psalm.

8 O

Details Are Being Investigated

On August i ith, word came to the Ninoshima Mili-
tary Hospital that a large number of military cas-
ualties from the Chugoku Regional Army Headquar-
ters were to arrive on the island that day, and it was
deemed necessary to evacuate all civilian patients. Miss
Sasaki, still running an alarmingly high fever, was put
on a large ship. She lay out on deck, with a pillow un-
der her leg. There were awnings over the deck, but
the vessel’s course put her in the sunlight. She felt as
if she were under a magnifying glass in the sun. Pus
oozed out of her wound, and soon the whole pillow
was covered with it. She was taken ashore at Hats-
ukaichi, a town several miles to the southwest of
Hiroshima, and put in the Goddess of Mercy Primary
School, which had been turned into a hospital. She
lay there for several days before a specialist on frac-
tures came from Kobe. By then her leg was red and
swollen up to her hip. The doctor decided he could
not set the breaks. He made an incision and put in a
rubber pipe to drain oflE the putrescence.

At the Novitiate, the motherless Kataoka children
were inconsolable. Father Cieslik worked hard to keep
them distracted. He put riddles to them. He asked.
What is the cleverest animal in the world?,” and after
the thirteen-year-old girl had guessed the ape, the ele-
phant, the horse, he said, "No, it must be the hippo-
potamus,” because in Japanese that animal is kaba^
the reverse of baka, stupid. He told Bible stories, be-
ginning, in the order of things, with the Creation. He

HIROSHIMA

showed them a scrapbook, of snapshots taken in Eu-
rope. Nevertheless, they cried most of the time for
their mother.

Several days later. Father Cieslik started hunting for
the children’s family. First, he learned through the
police that an uncle had been to the authorities in
Kure, a city not far away, to inquire for the children.
After that, he heard that an older brother had been
trying to trace them through the post ofi&ce in Ujina, a
suburb of Hiroshima. Still later, he heard that the
mother was alive and was on Goto Island, off Nagasaki.
And at last, by keeping a check on the Ujina post of-
fice, he got in touch with the brother and returned the
children to their mother.

About a week after the bomb dropped, a vague, in-
comprehensible rumor reached Hiroshima— that the
city had been destroyed by the energy released when
atoms were somehow split in two. The weapon was
referred to in this word-of-mouth report as genshi
bakudan— the root characters of which can be tran-
slated as “original child bomb.” No one understood
the idea or put any more credence in it than in the
powdered magnesium and such things. Newspapers
were being brought in from other cities, but they
were still confining themselves to extremely general
statements, such as Domei’s assertion on August 12th:
“There is nothing to do but admit the tremendous
power of this inhuman bomb.” Already, Japanese
physicists had entered the city with Lauritsen electro-

Details Are Being Investigated

scopes and Neher electrometers; they understood the
idea all too well.

On August isth, the Nakamuras, all o£ them still
rather sick, went to the nearby town of Kabe and
moved in with Mrs. Nakamura’s sister-in-law. The
next day, Mrs. Nakamura, although she was too ill to
walk much, returned to Hiroshima alone, by electric
car to the outskirts, by foot from there. All week, at
the Novitiate, she had worried about her mother,
brother, and older sister, who had lived in the part of
town called Fukuro, and besides, she felt drawn by
some fascination, just as Father Kleinsorge had been.
She discovered that her family were all dead. She went
back to Kabe so amazed and depressed by what she had
seen and learned in the city that she could not speak
that evening.

A COMPARATIVE Orderliness, at least, began to be es-
tablished at the Red Cross Hospital. Dr. Sasaki, back
from his rest, undertook to classify his patients (who
were still scattered everywhere, even on the stairways) .
The staflE gradually swept up the debris. Best of all,
the nurses and attendants started to remove the
corpses. Disposal of the dead, by decent cremation and
enshrinement, is a greater moral responsibility to the
Japanese than adequate care of the living. Relatives
identified most of the first day’s dead in and around
the hospital. Beginning on the second day, whenever
a patient appeared to be moribund, a piece of paper

HIROSHIMA

with his name on it was fastened to his clothing. The
corpse detail carried the bodies to a clearing outside,
placed them on pyres of wood from ruined houses,
burned them, put some of the ashes in envelopes in-
tended for exposed X-ray plates, marked the envelopes
with the names of the deceased, and piled them, neatly
and respectfully, in stacks in the main oflSce. In a few
days, the envelopes filled one whole side of the im-
promptu shrine.

In Kabe, on the morning of August 15th, ten-year-
old Toshio Nakamura heard an airplane overhead. He
ran outdoors and identified it with a professional eye
as a B-29. “There goes Mr. B!” he shouted.

One of his relatives called out to him, “Haven’t you
had enough of Mr. B?”

The question had a kind of symbolism. At almost
that very moment, the dull, dispirited voice of Hiro-
hito, the Emperor Tenno, was speaking for the first
time in history over the radio: “After pondering
deeply the general trends of the world and the actual
conditions obtaining in Our Empire today. We have
decided to effect a settlement of the present situation
by resorting to an extraordinary measure. . .

Mrs. Nakamura had gone to the city again, to dig
up some rice she had buried in her Neighborhood As-
sociation air-raid shelter. She got it and started back
for Kabe. On the electric car, quite by chance, she ran
into her younger sister, who had not been in Hiro-

84

Details Are Being Investigated

shima the day of the bombing. ‘‘Have you heard the
news?’’ her sister asked.

“What news?”

“The war is over.”

“Don’t say such a foolish thing, sister.”

“But I heard it over the radio myself.” And then, in
a whisper, “It was the Emperor’s voice.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Nakamura said (she needed nothing
more to make her give up thinking, in spite of the
atomic bomb, that Japan still had a chance to win the
war) , “in that case . . .”

S OME time later, in a letter to an American, Mr. Tani-
moto described the events of that morning. “At the
time of the Post-War, the marvelous thing in our his-
tory happened. Our Emperor broadcasted his own
voice through radio directly to us, common people of
Japan. Aug. 1 5th we were told that some news of great
importance could be heard & all of us should hear it.
So I went to Hiroshima railway station. There set a
loud-speaker in the ruins of the station. Many civilians,
all of them were in boundage, some being helped by
shoulder of their daughters, some sustaining their in-
jured feet by sticks, they listened to the broadcast and
when they came to realize the fact that it was the Em-
peror, they cried with full tears in their eyes, ‘What a
wonderful blessing it is that Tenno himself call on
us and we can hear his own voice in person. We are
thoroughly satisfied in such a great sacrifice.’ When

85

HIROSHIMA

they came to know the war was ended— that is, Japan
was defeated, they, of course, were deeply disap-
pointed, but followed after their Emperor’s command-
ment in calm spirit, making whole-hearted sacrifice
for tile everlasting peace of the world— and Japan
started her new way/’

86

IV • Panic Grass and Feverfew

O N August i8th, twelve days after the bomb burst.
Father Kleinsorge set out on foot for Hiroshima
from the Novitiate with his papier-mach^ suitcase in
his hand. He had begun to think that this bag, in
which he kept his valuables, had a talismanic quality,
because of the way he had found it after the explosion,
standing handle-side up in the doorway of his room,
while the desk under which he had previously hidden
it was in splinters all over the floor. Now he was using
it to carry the yen belonging to the Society of Jesus to
the Hiroshima branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank,
already reopened in its half-ruined building. On the
whole, he felt quite well that morning. It is true that
the minor cuts he had received had not healed in three
or four days, as the rector of the Novitiate, who had
examined them, had positively promised they would,
but Father Kleinsorge had rested well for a week and
considered that he was again ready for hard work. By

HIROSHIMA

now he was accustomed to the terrible scene through
which he walked on his way into the city: the large rice
field near the Novitiate, streaked with brown; the
houses on the outskirts of the city, standing but de-
crepit, with broken windows and dishevelled tiles; and
then, quite suddenly, the beginning of the four square
miles of reddish-brown scar, where nearly everything
had been buffeted down and burned; range on range
of collapsed city blocks, with here and there a crude
sign erected on a pile of ashes and tiles (‘‘Sister, where
are you?” or “All safe and we live at Toyosaka”); naked
trees and canted telephone poles; the few standing,
gutted buildings only accentuating the horizontality
of everything else (the Museum of Science and Indus-
try, with its dome stripped to its steel frame, as if for
an autopsy; the modem Chamber of Commerce Build-
ing, its tower as cold, rigid, and unassailable after the
blow as before; the huge, low-lying, camouflaged city
hall; the row of dowdy banks, caricaturing a shaken
economic system); and in the streets a macabre traffic
—hundreds of crumpled bicycles, shells of streetcars
and automobiles, all halted in mid-motion. The whole
way. Father Kleinsorge was oppressed by the thought
that all the damage he saw had been done in one in-
stant by one bomb. By the time he reached the center
of town, the day had become very hot. He walked to
the Yokohama Bank, which was doing business in a
temporary wooden stall on the ground floor of its
building, deposited the money, went by the mission
compound just to have another look at the wreckage,

88

Panic Grass and Feverfew

and then started back to the Novitiate. About halfway
there, he began to have peculiar sensations. The more
or less magical suitcase, now empty, suddenly seemed
terribly heavy. His knees grew weak. He felt excruci-
atingly tired. With a considerable expenditure of spirit,
he managed to reach the Novitiate. He did not think
his weakness was worth mentioning to the other Jesuits,
But a couple of days later, while attempting to say
Mass, he had an onset of faintness and even after three
attempts was unable to go through with the service,
and the next morning the rector, who had examined
Father Kleinsorge’s apparently negligible but un-
healed cuts daily, asked in surprise, ‘'What have you
done to your wounds?” They had suddenly opened
wider and were swollen and inflamed.

As she dressed on the morning of August 20th, in
the home of her sister-in-law in Kabe, not far from
Nagatsuka, Mrs. Nakamura, who had suffered no cuts
or bums at all, though she had been rather nauseated
all through the week she and her children had spent
as guests of Father Kleinsorge and the other Catholics
at the Novitiate, began fixing her hair and noticed,
after one stroke, that her comb carried with it a whole
handful of hair; the second time, the same thing hap-
pened, so she stopped combing at once. But in the next
three or four days, her hair kept falling out of its own
accord, until she was quite bald. She began living in-
doors, practically in hiding. On August 26th, both she
and her younger daughter, Myeko, woke up feeling
extremely weak and tired, and they stayed on their

HIROSHIMA

bedrolls. Her son and other daughter, vdio had shared
every experience with her during and after the bomb-
ing, felt fine.

At about the same time— he lost track of the days, so
hard was he irorking to set up a temporary place of
worship in a private house he had rented in the out-
skirts— Mr. Tanimoto fell suddenly ill with a general
malaise, weariness, and feverishness, and he, too, took
to his bedroll on the floor of the half-wrecked house of
a friend in the suburb of Ushida.

These four did not realize it, but they were coming
down with the strange, capricious disease which came
later to be known as radiation sickness.

IVIrss Sasaki lay in steady pain in the Goddess of Mercy
Primary School, at Hatsukaichi, the fourth station to
the southwest of Hiroshima on the electric train. An
internal infection still prevented the proper setting
of the compound fracture of her lower left leg. A young
man who was in the same hospital and who seemed to
have grown fond of her in spite of her unremitting
preoccupation with her suffering, or else just pitied
her because of it, lent her a Japanese translation of
de Maupassant, and she tried to read the stories, but
she could concentrate for only four or five minutes at
a time.

The hospitals and aid stations around Hiroshima
were so crowded in the first weeks after the bombing,
and their staffs were so variable, depending on their
health and on the unpredictable arrival of outside help,

90

Panic Grass and Feverfeiu

that patients had to be constantly shifted from place
to place. Miss Sasaki, who had already been moved
three times, twice by ship, was taken at the end of
August to an engineering school, also at Hatsukaichi.
Because her leg did not improve but swelled more and
more, the doctors at the school bound it with crude
splints and took her by car, on September gth, to the
Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima. This was the first
chance she had had to look at the ruins of Hiroshima:
the last time she had been carried through the city’s
streets, she had been hovering on the edge of uncon-
sciousness. Even though the wreckage had been de-
scribed to her, and though she was still in pain, the
sight horrified and amazed her, and there was some-
thing she noticed about it that particularly gave her
the creeps. Over everything— up through the wreckage
of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled
among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree
trunks— was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic
green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of
ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild
flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The
bomb had not only left the underground organs of
plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were
bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning
glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane
and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew.
Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in
extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among
the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up

HIROSHIMA

in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the
asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna
seed had been dropped along with the bomb.

At the Red Cross Hospital, Miss Sasaki was put
under the care of Dr. Sasaki. Now, a month after the
explosion, something like order had been reestablished
in the hospital: which is to say that the patients who
still lay in the corridors at least had mats to sleep on
and that the supply of medicines, which had given
out in the first few days, had been replaced, though
inadequately, by contributions from other cities. Dr.
Sasaki, who had had 6'ne seventeen-hour sleep at his
home on the third night, had ever since then rested
only about six hours a night, on a mat at the hospital;
he had lost twenty pounds from his very small body; he
still wore the borrowed glasses.

Since Miss Sasaki was a woman and was so sick (and
perhaps, he afterward admitted, just a little bit because
she was named Sasaki), Dr. Sasaki put her on a mat in
a semi-private room, which at that time had only eight
people in it. He questioned her and put dowm on her
record card, in the correct, scrunched-up German in
which he wnrote all his records: "Mittelgrosse Patientin
in gutem Erndhrungszustand. Fraktur am linken Un-
terschenkelknochen mit Wunde; Anschwellung in der
linken Unterschenkelgegend. Haul und sichtbare
Schleimhdute massig durchblutet und kein Oedema”
noting that she was a medium-sized female patient in
good general health; that she had a compound fracture

92

Panic Grass and Feverfew

of the left tibia, with swelling of the left lower leg;
that her skin and visible mucous membranes were
heavily spotted with petechiae^ which are hemor-
rhages about the size of grains of rice, or even as big
as soybeans; and, in addition, that her head, eyes,
throat, lungs, and heart were apparently normal; and
that she had a fever. He wanted to set her fracture and
put her leg in a cast, but he had run out of plaster of
Paris long since, so he just stretched her out on a
mat and prescribed aspirin for her fever, and glucose
intravenously and diastase orally for her undernourish-
ment (which he had not entered on her record because
everyone suffered from it). She exhibited only one of
the queer symptoms so many of his patients were just
then beginning to show— the spot hemorrhages.

Dr. Fujii was still pursued by bad luck, which still
was connected with rivers. Now he was living in the
summer house of Mr. Okuma, in Fukawa. This house
clung to the steep banks of the Ota River. Here his in-
juries seemed to make good progress, and he even
began to treat refugees who came to him from the
neighborhood, using medical supplies he had retrieved
from a cache in the suburbs. He noticed in some of his
patients a curious syndrome of symptoms that cropped
out in the third and fourth weeks, but he was not able
to do much more than swathe cuts and bums. Early
in September, it began to rain, steadily and heavily.
The river rose. On September lyth, there came a cloud-

HIROSHIMA

burst and then a typhoon, and the water crept higher
and higher up the bank. Mr. Okuma and Dr. Fujii be-
came alarmed and scrambled up the mountain to a
peasant’s house. (Dovvn in Hiroshima, tire flood took
up where the bomb had left off— swrept axvay bridges
tirat had survived the blast, washed out streets, under-
mined foundations of buildings that still stood— and
ten miles to the west, the Ono Army Hospital, where a
team of experts from Kyoto Imperial University was
studying the delayed affliction of the patients, suddenly
slid down a beautiful, pine-dark mountainside into the
Inland Sea and drowned most of the investigators and
their mysteriously diseased patients alike.) After the
storm. Dr. Fujii and Mr. Okuma went down to the
river and found that the Okuma house had been washed
altc^ether away.

Because so many people were suddenly feeling sick
nearly a month after the atomic bomb was dropped, an
unpleasant rumor began to move around, and even-
tually it made its way to the house in Kabe where
Mrs. Nakamura lay bald and ill. It was that the atomic
bomb had deposited some sort of poison on Hiroshima
which would give off deadly emanations for seven
years; nobody could go there all that time. This es-
pecially upset Mrs. Nakamura, who remembered that
in a moment of confusion on the morning of the ex-
plosion she had literally sunk her entire means of live-
lihood, her Sankoku sewing machine, in the small

94

Panic Grass and Feverfew

cement water tank in front of what was left of her
house; now no one would be able to go and fish it
out. Up to this time, Mrs. Nakamura and her rela-
tives had been quite resigned and passive about the
moral issue of the atomic bomb, but this rumor sud-
denly aroused them to more hatred and resentment of
America than they had felt all through the wan

Japanese physicists, who knew a great deal about
atomic fission (one of them owned a cyclotron), worried
about lingering radiation at Hiroshima, and in mid-
August, not many days after President Truman's dis-
closure of the type of bomb that had been dropped,
they entered the city to make investigations. The first
thing they did was roughly to determine a center by
observing the side-on which telephone poles all around
the heart of the town were scorched; they settled on the
torii gateway of the Gokoku Shrine, right next to the
parade ground of the Chugoku Regional Army Head-
quarters. From there, they worked north and south
with Lauritsen electroscopes, which are sensitive to both
beta particles and gamma rays. These indicated that
the highest intensity of radioactivity, near the torii,
was 4.2 times the average natural '‘leak” of ultra-short
waves for the earth of that area. The scientists noticed
that the flash of the bomb had discolored concrete to
a light reddish tint, had scaled off the surface of granite,
and had scorched certain other types of building ma-
terial, and that consequently the bomb had, in some
places, left prints of the shadows that had been cast

HIROSHIMA

by its lighL The experts found, for instance, a perma-
nent shadow thrown on the roof of the Chamber of
Commerce Building (220 yards from the rough cen-
ter) by the structure's rectangular tower; several
others in the lookout post on top of the Hypothec Bank
(2,050 yards); another in the tower of the Chugoku
Electric Supply Building (800 yards); another pro-
jected by the handle of a gas pump (2,630 yards); and
several on granite tombstones in the Gokoku Shrine
(385 yards). By triangulating these and other such
shadows with the objects that formed them, the scien-
tists determined that the exact center was a spot a hun-
dred and fifty yards south of the torii and a few yards
southeast of the pile of ruins that had once been the
Shima Hospital. (A few vague human silhouettes were
found, and these gave rise to stories that eventually
included fancy and precise details. One story told how
a painter on a ladder was monumentalized in a kind
of bas-relief on the stone facade of a bank building on
which he was at work, in the act of dipping his brush
into his paint can; another, how a man and his cart
on the bridge near the Museum of Science and Indus-
try, almost under the center of the explosion, were cast
down in an embossed shadow which made it clear that
the man was about to whip his horse.) Starting east and
west from the actual center, the scientists, in early
September, made new measurements, and the highest
radiation they found this time was 3.9 times the natural
**leak." Since radiation of at least a thousand times
the natural “leak*' would be required to cause serious

96

Panic Grass and Feverfew

effects on the human body, the scientists announced
that people could enter Hiroshima without any peril
at all.

As soon as this reassurance reached the household
in which Mrs. Nakamura was concealing herself— or,
at any rate, within a short time, after her hair had
started growing back again— her whole family relaxed
their extreme hatred of America, and Mrs. Nakamura
sent her brother-in-law to look for the sewing ma-
chine. It was still submerged in the water tank, and
when he brought it home, she saw, to her dismay, that
it was all rxisted and useless.

By the end of the first week in September, Father
Kleinsorge was in bed at the Novitiate with a fever of
102.2, and since he seemed to be getting worse, his col-
leagues decided to send him to the Catholic Interna-
tional Hospital in Tokyo. Father Cieslik and the rector
took him as far as Kobe and a Jesuit from that city
took him the rest of the way, with a message from a
Kobe doctor to the Mother Superior of the Interna-
tional Hospital: *'Think twice before you give this man
blood transfusions, because with atomic-bomb patients
we aren’t at all sure that if you stick needles in them,
they’ll stop bleeding.”

When Father Kleinsorge arrived at the hospital, he
was terribly pale and very shaky. He complained that
the bomb had upset his digestion and given him ab-
dominal pains. His white blood count was three thou-
sand (five to seven thousand is normal), he was

HIROSHIMA

seriously anemic, and his temperature was 104. A doc-
tor who did not know much about these strange mani-
festations— Father Kleinsorge was one of a handful of
atomic patients who had reached Tokyo — came to see
him, and to the patient’s face he was most encouraging.
“You’ll be out of here in two weeks,” he said. But when
the doctor got out in the corridor, he said to the Mother
Superior, “He’ll die. All these bomb people die—
you’ll see. They go along for a couple of weeks and
then they die.”

The doctor prescribed suralimentation for Father
Kleinsorge. Every three hours, they forced some eggs
or beef juice into him, and they fed him all the sugar
he could stand. They gave him vitamins, and iron pills
and arsenic (in Fowler’s solution) for his anemia. He
confounded both the doctor’s predictions; he neither
died nor got up in a fortnight. Despite the fact that
the message from the Kobe doctor deprived him of
transfusions, which would have been the most useful
therapy of all, his fever and his digestive troubles
cleared up fairly quickly. His white count went up
for a while, but early in October it dropped again, to
3,600: then, in ten days, it suddenly climbed above
normal, to 8,800; and it finally settled at 5,800. His
ridiculous scratches puzzled everyone. For a few days,
they would mend, and then, when he moved around,
they would open up again. As soon as he began to feel
well, he enjoyed himself tremendously. In Hiro-
shima he had been one of thousands of sufferers; in
Tokyo he was a curiosity. American Army doctors

9 8

Panic Grass and Feverfew

came by the dozen to observe him. Japanese experts
questioned him. A newspaper interviewed him. And
once, the confused doctor came and shook his head and
said, “Baffling cases, tliese atomic-bomb people.”

Mrs. Nakamura lay indoors with Myeko. They both
continued sick, and though Mrs. Nakamura vaguely
sensed that their trouble was caused by the bomb, she
was too poor to see a doctor and so never knew exactly
what the matter was. Without any treatment at all, but
merely resting, they began gradually to feel better.
Some of Myeko's hair fell out, and she had a tiny burn
on her arm which took months to heal. The boy,
Toshio, and the older girl, Yaeko, seemed well enough,
though they, too, lost some hair and occasionally had
bad headaches, Toshio was still having nightmares, al-
ways about the nineteen-year-old mechanic, Hideo
Osaki, his hero, who had been killed by the bomb.

On his back with a fever of 104, Mr. Tanimoto wor-
ried about all the funerals he ought to be conducting
for the deceased of his church. He thought he was just
overtired from the hard work he had done since the
bombing, but after the fever had persisted for a few
days, he sent for a doctor. The doctor was too busy to
visit him in Ushida, but he dispatched a nurse, who
recognized his symptoms as those of mild radiation dis-
ease and came back from time to time to give him in-
jections of Vitamin Bi. A Buddhist priest with whom
Mr. Tanimoto was acquainted called on him and sug-

HIROSHIMA

gested that moxibustion might give him relief; the
priest showed the pastor how to give himself the an-
cient Japanese treatment, by setting fire to a twist of
the stimulant herb moxa placed on the wrist pulse. Mr.
Tanimoto found that each moxa treatment tempo-
rarily reduced his fever one degree. The nurse had
told him to eat as much as possible, and every few days
his mother-in-law brought him vegetables and fish
from Tsuzu, twenty miles away, where she lived. He
spent a month in bed, and then went ten hours by train
to his father’s home in Shikoku. There he rested an-
other month.

Dr. Sasaki and his colleagues at the Red Cross Hos-
pital watched the unprecedented disease unfold and
at last evolved a theory about its nature. It had, they
decided, three stages. The first stage had been all over
before the doctors even knew they were dealing with
a new sickness; it was the direct reaction to the bom-
bardment of the body, at the moment when the bomb
went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays.
The apparently uninjured people who had died so
mysteriously in the first few hours or days had suc-
cumbed in this first stage. It killed ninety-five per cent
of the people within a half mile of the center, and many
thousands who were farther away. The doctors realized
in retrospect that even though most of these dead had
also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had ab-
sorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply
destroyed body cells— caused their nuclei to degen-

• 1 O O

Panic Grass and Feverfew

erate and broke their walls. Many people who did not
die right away came down with nausea, headache,
diarrhea, malaise, and fever, which lasted several days.
Doctors could not be certain whether some of these
symptoms were the result of radiation or nervous
shock. The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after
the bombing. Its first symptom was falling hair.
Diarrhea and fever, which in some cases went as high as
io6, came next. Twenty-five to thirty days after the
explosion, blood disorders appeared: gums bled, the
white-blood-cell count dropped sharply, and petechiae
appeared on the skin and mucous membranes. The
drop in the number of white blood corpuscles reduced
the patient’s capacity to resist infection, so open
wounds were unusually slow in healing and many of
the sick developed sore throats and mouths. The two
key symptoms, on which the doctors came to base
their prognosis, were fever and the lowered white-
corpuscle count. If fever remained steady and high,
the patient’s chances for survival were poor. The white
count almost always dropped below four thousand; a
patient whose count fell below one thousand had little
hope of living. Toward the end of the second stage, if
the patient survived, anemia, or a drop in the red blood
count, also set in. The third stage was the reaction
that came when the body struggled to compensate for
its ills— when, for instance, the white count not only
returned to normal but increased 'to much higher
than normal levels. In this stage, many patients died
of complications, such as infections in the chest cavity.

1 O 1

HIROSHIMA

Most burns healed with deep layers of pink, rubbery
scar tissue, known as keloid tumors. The dumtion of
the disease varied, depending on the patient’s constitu-
tion and the amount of radiation he had received. Some
victims recovered in a week; with others the disease
dragged on for months.

As the symptoms revealed themselves, it became
clear that many of them resembled the effects of over-
doses of X-ray, and the doctors based their therapy on
that likeness. They gave victims liver extract, blood
transfusions, and vitamins, especially Bi. The shortage
of supplies and instruments hampered them. Allied
doctors who came in after the surrender found plasma
and penicillin very effective. Since the blood disorders
were, in the long run, the predominant factor in the
disease, some of the Japanese doctors evolved a theory
as to the seat of the delayed sickness. They thought that
perhaps gamma rays, entering the body at the time
of the explosion, made the phosphorus in the victims’
bones radioactive, and that they in turn emitted beta
particles, which, though they could not penetrate far
through flesh, could enter the bone marrow, where
blood is manufectured, and gradually tear it down.
Whatever its source, the disease had some baffling
quirks. Not all the patients exhibited all the main
symptoms. People who suffered flash bums were pro-
tected, to a considerable extent, from radiation sick-
ness. Those who had lain quietly for days or even hours
after the bombing were much less liable to get sick than

10 2

Panic Grass and Feverfew

those who had been active. Gray hair seldom fell out.
And, as if nature were protecting man against his own
ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for
a time; men became sterile, women, had miscarriages,
menstruation stopped.

For ten days after the flood. Dr. Fujii lived in the
peasant's house on the mountain above the Ota. Then
he heard about a vacant private clinic in Kaitaichi, a
suburb to tlie east of Hiroshima. He bought it at
once, moved there, and hung out a sign inscribed in
English, in honor of the conquerors:

M. FUJII, M.D.

Medical & Venereal

Quite recovered from his wounds, he soon built up a
strong practice, and he was delighted, in the evenings,
to receive members of the occupying forces, on whom
he lavished whiskey and practiced English.

Giving Miss Sasaki a local anaesthetic of procaine. Dr.
Sasaki made an incision in her leg on October a 3rd, to
drain the infection, which still lingered on eleven
weeks after the injury. In the following days, so much
pus formed that he had to dress the opening each morn-
ing and evening. A week later, she complained of great
pain, so he made another incision; he cut still a third,
on November gth, and enlarged it on the twenty-sixth.
All this time. Miss Sasaki grew weaker and weaker, and

1 O 3

HIROSHIMA

her spirits fell low. One day, the young man who had
lent her his translation of de Maupassant at Hatsu-
kaichi came to visit her; he told her that he was going
to Kyushu but that when he came back, he would like
to see her again. She didn’t care. Her leg had been so
swollen and painful all along that the doctor had not
even tried to set the fractures, and though an X-ray
taken in November showed that the bones were mend-
ing, she could see under the sheet that her left leg was
nearly three inches shorter than her right and that
her left foot was turning inward. She thought often of
the man to whom she had been engaged. Someone told
her he was back from overseas. She wondered what he
had heard about her injuries that made him stay
away.

Esther Kleinsorge was discharged from the hospital
in Tokyo on December 19th and took a train home. On
the way, two days later, at Yokogawa, a stop just before
Hiroshima, Dr. Fujii boarded the train. It was the
first time the two men had met since before the bomb-
ing. They sat together. Dr. Fujii said he was going to
the annual gathering of his family, on the anniversary
of his father’s death. When they started talking about
their experiences, the Doctor was quite entertaining
as he told how his places of residence kept falling into
rivers. Then he asked Father Kleinsorge how he was,
and the Jesuit talked about his stay in the hospital.
"'The doctors told me to be cautious,” he said. "They
ordered me to have a two-hour nap every afternoon.”

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Panic Grass and Feverfew

Dr. Fujii said, “It’s hard to be cautious in Hiroshima
these days. Everyone seems to be so busy.”

A NEW municipal government, set up under Allied
Military Government direction, had gone to work at
last in the city hall. Citizens who had recovered from
various degrees o£ radiation sickness were coming back
by the thousand— by November ist, the population,
mostly crowded into the outskirts, was already 1 37,000,
more than a third of the wartime peak— and the govern-
ment set in motion all kinds of projects to put them to
work rebuilding the city. It hired men to clear the
streets, and others to gather scrap iron, which tliey
sorted and piled in mountains opposite the city hall.
Some returning residents were putting up their own
shanties and huts, and planting small squares of winter
wheat beside them, but the city also authorized and
built four hundred one-family '‘barracks/* Utilities
were repaired— electric lights shone again, trams started
running, and employees of the waterworks fixed sev-
enty thousand leaks in mains and plumbing. A Plan-
ning Conference, with an enthusiastic young Military
Government officer. Lieutenant John D. Montgomery,
of Kalamazoo, as its adviser, began to consider what
sort of city the new Hiroshima should be. The ruined
city had flourished— and had been an inviting target—
mainly because it had been one of the most important
military-command and communications centers in
Japan, and would have become the Imperial headquar-
ters had the islands been invaded and Tokyo been

1 05

HIROSHIMA

captured. Now there would be no huge military estab-
lishments to help revive the city. The Planning Confer-
ence, at a loss as to just what importance Hiroshima
could have, fell back on ratlier vague cultural and pav-
ing projects. It drew maps with avenues a hundred
yards wide and thought seriously of erecting a group of
buildings as a monument to the disaster, and naming
them the Institute of International Amity. Statistical
workers gathered what figures they could on the effects
of the bomb. They reported that 78,150 people had
been killed, 13,983 were missing, and 37>425 been
injured. No one in the city government pretended that
these figures were accurate— though the Americans ac-
cepted them as official— and as the months went by and
more and more hundreds of corpses were dug up from
the ruins, and as the number of unclaimed urns of ashes
at the Zempoji Temple in Koi rose into the thousands,
the statisticians began to say that at least a hundred
thousand people had lost their lives in the bombing.
Since many people died of a combination of causes, it
was impossible to figure exactly how many were killed
by each cause, but the statisticians calculated that about
twenty-five per cent had died of direct bums from the
bomb, about fifty per cent from other injuries, and
about twenty per cent as a result of radiation effects.
The statisticians’ figures on property damage were
more reliable: sixty-two thousand out of ninety thou-
sand buildings destroyed, and six thousand more dam-
aged beyond repair. In the heart of the city, they found
only five modem buildings that could be used again

106

Panic Grass and Feverfew

without major repairs. This small number was by no
means the fault of flimsy Japanese construction. In fact,
since the 1923 earthquake, Japanese building regula-
tions had required that the roof of each large building
be able to bear a minimum load of seventy pounds per
square foot, whereas American regulations do not nor-
mally specify more than forty pounds per square
foot.

Scientists swarmed into the city. Some of them meas-
ured the force that had been necessary to shift marble
gravestones in the cemeteries, to knock over twenty-two
of the forty-seven railroad cars in the yards at Hiro-
shima station, to lift and move the concrete roadway
on one of the bridges, and to perform other noteworthy
acts of strength, and concluded that the pressure ex-
erted by the explosion varied from 5.3 to 8.0 tons per
square yard. Others found that mica, of which the melt-
ing point is goo® C., had fused on granite gravestones
three hundred and eighty yards from the center; that
telephone poles of Cryptomeria japonica, whose car-
bonization temperature is 240® C., had been charred at
forty-four hundred yards from the center; and that the
surface of gray clay tiles of the type used in Hiroshima,
whose melting point is 1,300® C., had dissolved at six
hundred yards; and, after examining other significant
ashes and melted bits, they concluded that the bomb's
heat on the ground at the center must have been 6,000®
C, And from further measurements of radiation, which
involved, among other things, the scraping up of fission
fragments from roof troughs and drainpipes as far away

107

HIROSHIMA

as the suburb of Takasu, thirty-three hundred yards
from the center, they learned some far more important
facts about the nature of the bomb. General MacAr-
thur’s headquarters systematically censored all men-
tion of the bomb in Japanese scientific publications,
but soon the fruit of the scientists’ calculations became
common knowledge among Japanese physicists, doc-
tors, chemists, journalists, professors, and, no doubt,
those statesmen and military men who were still in
circulation. Long before the American public had been
told, most of the scientists and lots of non-scientists in
Japan knew— from the calculations of Japanese nuclear
physicists— that a uranium bomb had exploded at Hiro-
shima and a more powerful one, of plutonium, at Naga-
saki. They also knew that theoretically one ten times as
powerful— or twenty— could be developed. The Japa-
nese scientists thought they knew the exact height at
which the bomb at Hiroshima was exploded and the
approximate weight of the uranium used. They esti-
mated that, even with the primitive bomb used at Hiro-
shima, it would require a shelter of concrete fifty inches
thick to protect a human being entirely from radiation
sickness. The scientists had these and other details
which remained subject to security in the United States
printed and mimeographed and bound into little
books. The Americans knew of the existence of these,
but tracing them and seeing that they did not fall into
the wrong hands would have obliged the occupy-
ing authorities to set up, for this one purpose alone,
an enormous police system in Japan. Altogether, the

108

Panic Grass and Feverfew

Japanese scientists were somewhat amused at the ef-
forts of their conquerors to keep security on atomic
fission.

Late in February, 1946, a friend of Miss Sasaki’s
called on Father Kleinsorge and asked him to visit her
in the hospital. She had been growing more and more
depressed and morbid; she seemed little interested in
living. Father Kleinsorge went to see her several times.
On his first visit, he kept the conversation general, for-
mal, and yet vaguely sympathetic, and did not mention
religion. Miss Sasaki herself brought it up the second
time he dropped in on her. Evidently she had had some
talks with a Catholic. She asked bluntly, *'If your God
is so good and kind, how can he let people suffer like
this?” She made a gesture which took in her shrunken
leg, the other patients in her room, and Hiroshima as
a whole.

“My child,” Father Kleinsorge said, “man is not now
in the condition God intended. He has fallen from
grace through sin.” And he went on to explain all the
reasons for everything.

It came to Mrs. Nakamura’s attention that a carpenter
from Kabe was building a number of wooden shanties
in Hiroshima which he rented for fifty yen a month—
$3.33, at the fixed rate of exchange. Mrs. Nakamura
had lost the certificates for her bonds and other war-
time savings, but fortunately she had copied off all the
numbers just a few days before the bombing and had

1 O 9

HIROSHIMA

taken the list to Kabe, and so, when her hair had grown
in enough for her to be presentable, she went to her
bank in Hiroshima, and a clerk there told her that
after checking her numbers against the records the
bank would give her her money. As soon as she got it,
she rented one of the carpenter’s shacks. It was in
Nobori-cho, near the site of her former house, and
tliough its floor was dirt and it was dark inside, it was
at least a home in Hiroshima, and she was no longer
dependent on the charity of her in-laws. During the
spring, she cleared away some nearby wreckage and
planted a vegetable garden. She cooked with utensils
and ate off plates she scavenged from the debris. She
sent Myeko to the kindergarten which the Jesuits re-
opened, and the two older children attended Nobori-
cho Primary School, which, for want of buildings, held
classes out of doors. Toshio wanted to study to be a
mechanic, like his hero, Hideo Osaki. Prices were high;
by midsummer Mrs. Nakamura’s savings were gone.
She sold some of her clothes to get food. She had once
had several expensive kimonos, but during the war one
had been stolen, she had given one to a sister who had
been bombed out in Tokuyama, she had lost a couple
in the Hiroshima bombing, and now she sold her last
one. It brought only a hundred yen, which did not last
long. In June, she went to Father Kleinsorge for advice
about how to get along, and in early August, she was
still considering the two alternatives he suggested— tak-
ing work as a domestic for some of the Allied occupa-
tion forces, or borrowing from her relatives enough

1 1 O

Panic Grass and Feverfew

money, about five hundred yen, or a bit more than
thirty dollars, to repair her rusty sewing machine and
resume the work of a seamstress.

When Mr. Tanimoto returned from Shikoku, he
draped a tent he owned over the roof of the badly dam-
aged house he had rented in Ushida. The roof still
leaked, but he conducted services in the damp living
room. He began thinking about raising money to re-
store his church in the city. He became quite friendly
with Father Kleinsorge and saw the Jesuits often. He
envied them their Church’s wealth; they seemed to be
able to do anything they wanted. He had nothing to
work with except his own energy, and that was not what
it had been.

The Society of Jesus had been the first institution to
build a relatively permanent shanty in the ruins of
Hiroshima, That had been while Father Kleinsoi^e
was in the hospital. As soon as he got back, he began
living in the shack, and he and another priest. Father
Laderman, who had joined him in the mission, ar-
ranged for the purchase of three of the standardized
^‘bairacks,” which the city was selling at seven thousand
yen apiece. They put two together, end to end, and
made a pretty chapel of them; they ate in the third.
When materials were available, they commissioned a
contractor to build a three-story mission house exactly
like the one that had been destroyed in the fire. In the
compound, carpenters cut timbers, gouged mortises.

111

HIROSHIMA

shaped tenons, whittled scores of wooden pegs and
bored holes for them, until all the parts for the house
were in a neat pile; then, in three days, they put the
whole thing together, like an Oriental puzzle, without
any nails at all. Father Kleinsorge was finding it hard,
as Dr. Fujii had suggested he would, to be cautious and
to take his naps. He went out every day on foot to call
on Japanese Catholics and prospective converts. As the
months went by, he grew more and more tired. In June,
he read an article in the Hiroshima Chugoku warning
survivors against working too hard— but what could he
do? By July, he was worn out, and early in August,
almost exactly on the anniversary of the bombing, he
went back to the Catholic International Hospital, in
Tokyo, for a month’s rest.

^Vhether or not Father Kleinsorge’s answers to Miss
Sasaki*s questions about life were final and absolute
truths, she seemed quickly to draw physical strength
from them. Dr. Sasaki noticed it and congratulated
Father Kleinsorge. By April 1 5th, her temperature and
white count were normal and the infection in the
wound was beginning to clear up. On the twentieth,
there was almost no pus, and for the first time she jerked
along a corridor on crutches. Five days later, the wound
had begun to heal, and on the last day of the month
she was discharged.

During the early summer, she prepared herself for
conversion to Catholicism, In that period she had ups
and downs. Her depressions were deep. She knew she

11 ^

Panic Grass and Feverfew

would always be a cripple. Her fiance never came to see
her. There was nothing for her to do except read and
look out, from her house on a hillside in Koi, across the
ruins of the city where her parents and brother died.
She was nervous, and any sudden noise made her put
her hands quickly to her throat Her leg still hurt; she
rubbed it often and patted it, as if to console it.

It took six months for the Red Cross Hospital, and
even longer for Dr. Sasaki, to get back to normal. Until
the city restored electric power, the hospital had to
limp along with the aid of a Japanese Army generator
in its back yard. Operating tables, X-ray machines,
dentist chairs, everything complicated and essential
came in a trickle of charity from other cities. In
Japan, face is important even to insitutions, and long
before the Red Cross Hospital was back to par on basic
medical equipment, its directors put up a new yellow
brick veneer facade, so the hospital became the hand-
somest building in Hiroshima—from the street. For
the first four months. Dr. Sasaki was the only surgeon
on the staff and he almost never left the building;
then, gradually, he began to take an interest in his
own life again. He got married in March. He gained
back some of the weight he lost, but his appetite re-
mained only fair; before the bombing, he used to eat
four rice balls at every meal, but a year after it he
could manage only two. He felt tired all the time.
“But I have to realize,” he said, “that the whole com-
munity is tired.”

1 1 3

HIROSHIMA

A. YEAR after the bonxb was dropped. Miss Sasaki was
a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Klein-
sorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not ca-
pable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost
the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to
acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr.
Taniraoto’s church had been ruined and he no longer
had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six peo-
ple, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would
never be the same. What they thought of their experi-
ences and of the use of the atomic bomb was, of course,
not unanimous. One feeling they did seem to share,
however, was a curious kind of elated community
spirit, something like that of the Londoners after their
blitz— a pride in the way they and their fellow-survivors
had stood up to a dreadful ordeal. Just before the an-
niversary, Mr. Xanimoto wrote in a letter to an Amer-
ican some words which expressed this feeling: "What
a heartbreaking scene this was the first night! About
midnight I landed on the riverbank. So many injured
people lied on the ground that I made my way by
striding over them. Repeating ‘Excuse me,’ I for-
warded and carried a tub of water with me and gave
a cup of water to each one of them. They raised their
upper bodies slowly and accepted a cup of water with
a bow and drunk quietly and, spilling any remnant,
gave back a cup with hearty expression of their thank-
fulness, and said, ‘I couldn’t help my sister, who was
buried under the house, because I had to take care of
my mother who got a deep wound on her eye and our

1 1 4

Panic Grass and Feverfew

house soon set fire and we hardly escaped. Look, I lost
my home, my family, and at last my-self bitterly in-
jured. But now I have gotted my mind to dedicate
what I have and to complete the war for our country’s
sake.’ Thus they pledged to me, even women and chil-
dren did the same. Being entirely tired I lied down on
the ground among them, but couldn’t sleep at all.
Next morning I found many men and women dead,
whom I gave water last night. But, to my great sur-
prise, I never heard any one cried in disorder, even
though they suffered in great agony. They died in si-
lence, with no grudge, setting their teeth to bear it. All
for the country!

‘'Dr. Y. Hiraiwa, professor of Hiroshima University
of Literature and Science, and one of my church mem-
bers, was buried by the bomb under the two storied
house with his son, a student of Tokyo University.
Both of them could not move an inch under tremen-
dously heavy pressure. And the house already caught
fire. His son said, ‘Father, we can do nothing except
make our mind up to consecrate our lives for the coun-
try. Let us give Banzai to our Emperor.’ Then the
father followed after his son, 'Tenno-heika, Banzai,
Banzai, Banzai!" In the result, Dr. Hiraiwa said,
‘Strange to say, I felt calm and bright and peaceful
spirit in my heart, when I chanted Banzai to Tenno.’
Afterward his son got out and digged down and pulled
out his father and thus they were saved. In thinking
of their experience of that time Dr. Hiraiwa repeated,
‘What a fortunate that we are Japanese! It was my first

1 1 5

HIROSHIMA

time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I de-
cided to die for our Emperor/

“Miss Kayoko Nobutoki, a student of girFs high
school, Hiroshima Jazabuin, and a daughter of my
church member, was taking rest with her friends be-
side the hea\'7’ fence of the Buddhist Temple. At the
moment the atomic bomb was dropped, the fence fell
upon them. They could not move a bit under such a
heavy fence and then smoke entered into even a crack
and choked their breath. One of the girls begun to
sing Kimi ga yo, national anthem, and others followed
in chorus and died. Meanwhile one of them found a
crack and struggled hard to get out. When she was
taken in the Red Cross Hospital she told how her
friends died, tracing back in her memory to singing
in chorus our national anthem. They were just 13
years old.

“Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic
bombing, believing that it was for Emperor's sake."

A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima re-
mained more or less indifferent about the ethics of
using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it
to want to think about it at all. Not many of them
even bothered to find out much about what it was like.
Mrs. Nakamura's conception of it— and awe of it— was
typical. “The atom bomb," she would say when asked
about it, “is the size of a matchbox. The heat of it is
six thousand times that of the sun. It exploded in the
air. There is some radium in it. I don't know just how
it works, but when the radium is put together, it ex-

116

Panic Grass and Feverfew

plodes.” As for the use of the bomb, she would say, “It
was war and we had to expect it.” And then she would
add, ‘‘Shikata ga nai/' a Japanese expression as com-
mon as, and corresponding to, the Russian word
'"nichevo”: “It can’t be helped. Oh, well. Too bad.”
Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the
use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in
German: ist nichts zu machen. There’s notliing

to be done about it.”

Many citizens of Hiroshima, however, continued to
feel a hatred for Americans which nothing could pos-
sibly erase. “I see,” Dr. Sasaki once said, “that they are
holding a trial for war criminals in Tokyo just now.
I think they ought to try the men who decided to use
the bomb and they should hang them all.”

Father Kleinsorge and the other German Jesuit
priests, who, as foreigners, could be expected to take
a relatively detached view, often discussed the ethics
of using the bomb. One of them, Father Siemes, who
was out at Nagatsuka at the time of the attack, wrote
in a report to the Holy See in Rome: “Some of us con-
sider the bomb in the same category as poison gas and
were against its use on a civilian population. Others
were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on
in Japan, there was no difference between civilians
and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective
force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to
surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems
logical that he who supports total war in principal
cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux

1 1 7

HIROSHIMA

of the matter is whether total war in its present form
is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does
it not have material and spiritual evil as its conse-
quences which far exceed whatever good might result?
When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this
question?”

It would be impossible to say what horrors were
embedded in the minds of the children who lived
through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the
surface, their recollections, months after the disaster,
were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura,
who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able
to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience, and
a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the fol-
lowing matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Nobori-
cho Primary School: ‘'The day before the bomb, I
went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts.
I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister's sleeping
place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as
the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things.
The neighbors were walking around burned and
bleeding. Hataya-^an told me to run away with her. I
said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the
park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned
and I saw the reflection in tlie river. We stayed in the
park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and
met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were
looking for their mothers. But Kikuki's mother was
wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book has been set on the Linotype in
a type-face called '‘Baskerville” The face is a fac-
simile reproduction of types cast from molds made for
John Baskerville (iyo6-iyy^) from his designs. The
punches for the revived Linotype Baskerville were
cut under the supervision of the English printer
George W. Jones.

John Baskerville's original face was one of the fore-
runners of the type-style known as '^modern face^* to
printers: a ^‘modern** of the period a.d. j8oo.

The book was composed, printed, and bound by
H. Wolff, New York. Typography, binding, and
jacket design by Warren Chappell.

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